Hoping to better define Cambodia’s abduction and sexual exploitation laws, government and legal aid officials opened a two-day conference Tuesday that they hope will produce recommendations to improve the country’s draft human trafficking legislation.
“The concepts are very vague. Nobody knows their meaning and it causes the implementation of the laws to not be effective,” said Sok Sam Oeun, executive director of the Cambodian Defenders Project.
This vast legislative gray area was called into question recently with the arrests of dozens of young Vietnamese women and girls who eventually were convicted in Cambodian courts on illegal immigration charges, even though authorities admit they were likely trafficking victims.
Eleven Vietnamese women rescued in May from an alleged brothel are expected in Phnom Penh’s Municipal Court today where they could be convicted on illegal immigration charges stemming from a Sept 9 trial.
Some of those previously convicted under similar circumstances have faced short stints in jail—drawing fire from trafficking victim advocates—and all are facing deportation back to Vietnam.
Some fear that Cambodia’s loose policing and corrupt courts are making the country an increasingly popular gateway for human traffickers moving their human freight to third countries.
Officials Tuesday recommended defining specific terms in the draft trafficking legislation such as “human abduction,” and expanding the legal definition of trafficking victims to include those bought in from a foreign country to work either in Cambodia or elsewhere as laborers or in the sex industry.
Sok Sam Oeun also said meeting participants will recommend giving local authorities—from police to commune or district level officials—broad powers to enter brothels and rescue suspected trafficking victims.
But these powers have not yet been more narrowly defined to specify which local authorities have what power, or what evidence is necessary to allow them to act.
