Box 10: A stateless victim of internal trafficking in Côte d’Ivoire Ibrahima was born in 1981 in Abengourou in the east of Côte d’Ivoire. He doesn’t know his parents, but he grew up among the Burkinabè community there and speaks Mooré. At six years old, he was taken away from the family where he was living by an “aunt”, and taken to Bapleu in the west of Côte d’Ivoire. The “aunt” left him with a man who subsequently entrusted him to another man, for whom he worked for seven years on a cocoa plantation, until he was 14 years old. At that age, he went back to see the first man, an important business person in Bapleu, asking to be reunited with his family; but, instead, he was threatened and worked a further seven years. In 2012, Ibrahima travelled alone to Abengourou to look for his parents, using as an identity document a Burkinabè consular card lent to him by the father of the young man it had belonged to, now deceased. He stayed three months in Abengourou, but failed to find his parents, and returned to Bapleu. According to the information he obtained from the chief of the Burkinabè community in Abengourou, it was believed that Ibrahima’s mother was Burkinabè, but nobody knew the real identity of the father, or had any information about the current whereabouts of his mother. The “aunt” who had taken him away had essentially stolen the boy and sold him for his labour; but she has now died. Ibrahima has recently tried to obtain a genuine Burkinabè consular card, on the basis of the information he had found out about his origins, but the Burkinabè consular authorities had refused to give him one because he had no documentary proof of his birth or parentage.269 269 Interview by Mirna Adjami, Duékué, July 2014. 80