Trafficking issues remain in Cambodia, US report says

By Lauren Crothers

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia

Cambodia remains a "source, transit, and destination country" for adults and children to be trafficked into labor or the sex trade, while many are subjected to similar ordeals abroad, the U.S. government’s latest Trafficking In Persons (TIP) report has found.

Because of this, it is ranked as a "tier two" country for the third year in a row, with tier three representing the worst.

A statement issued by the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh on Tuesday, a day after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry released this year’s TIP report, said that "while the government continued to prosecute and convict traffickers, including one case involving the forced labor of Cambodian men on commercial fishing vessels, it failed to increase overall efforts to combat all forms of human trafficking from the previous year."

These include people being forced into domestic servitude, being sent to toil as slaves on predominantly Thai-owned fishing vessels as far flung as "Malaysia, Indonesia, Mauritius, Fiji, Senegal, and South Africa", the report found.

In addition, "NGOs report women from rural areas are recruited under false pretences to travel to China to enter into marriages with Chinese men; some are subsequently subjected to forced factory labor or forced prostitution."

Children, meanwhile, are often forced into the sex trade or sent out to beg.

The statement acknowledged "the government’s efforts to combat child sex trafficking in commercial establishments in recent years", and the report itself noted that 12 foreign child-sex tourists were arrested, two of these and seven Cambodians were convicted for buying child sex -- an increase from seven similar convictions the previous year.

Cambodia was ranked tier two last year and in 2013 -- spared only from being automatically downgraded to tier three this year -- "because it has a national action plan to combat trafficking and is contributing significant resources toward implementation of the plan", the statement added.

The report said that using data collected from local NGOs, 326 people have been identified as sex-trafficking victims since the last report.

According to a study using data collected in 2008, but released in 2011 by the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Trafficking, there were 1,058 sex trafficking victims across the country. Of these, 127 were children and six were under the age of 13.

In June, The International Justice Mission (IJM) also released a study that found a 73-percent drop in the number of minors in Phnom Penh, Siem Reap and Sihanoukville -- the country’s three largest commercial sex markets. According to IJM, the number of minors is now 2.2 percent in these areas, down from the last time a similar study was carried out in 2012.

Interior Ministry spokesman Khieu Sopheak and Labor Ministry spokesman Heng Suor could not be reached, but Council of Ministers spokesman Phay Siphan told Anadolu Agency on Tuesday that the government is committed to "maintaining the dignity of the Cambodian people, which reflects our culture".

Asked about the prevalence of Cambodians working in slavelike conditions on Thai fishing vessels, Siphan said that "the labour department is looking very closely at that issue, and beside that, we are educating people to see how risky it is being involved in that".

With regard to female emigrants, many of whom end up working as domestic helpers abroad, he said staff at Cambodian embassies around the world have been instructed to “pay attention to Cambodian immigrant workers there” too.