Vietnam, China look for ways to halt human traffic
HANOI - Officials from Vietnam and China met on Monday to look for ways to stamp out cross-border trafficking of women and children.
In five days of field trips organised by the U.N. Children's Fund, delegations from the two countries will meet border guards and trafficking victims at reception centres on both sides of their frontier, UNICEF said in a statement.
UNICEF said according to a report by Vietnam's Ministry of Public Security in 2000, at least 22,000 Vietnamese women and children were sent to China between 1991 and 1999 as domestic workers, prostitutes or as "forced wives" as a result of China's shortage of women.
UNICEF said it hoped the exchanges would lead to a memorandum of understanding that would formally bind the two countries to a joint attack on human trafficking.
Vietnam's Ministry of Labour, War Invalids and Social Affairs said the Vietnamese delegation was led by ministry expert Cao Van Thanh.
UNICEF's Hanoi representative Anthony Bloomberg said the meeting would be a step towards fulfilling commitments Vietnam had made at the Second World Congress Against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children held in Yokohama last year.
"To fight these intolerable violations against children and women's rights, words now need to be translated into concrete actions," he said in the statement.
UNICEF's spokesman in Hanoi, Damien Personnaz, said the meetings were the first of the kind between the two countries and were a recognition by Vietnam of the extent of a problem it had not fully acknowledged.
UNICEF said that given the illicit nature of the people-smuggling business, little was known about the real scale and scope of the problem, but victims typically came from poor homes.
"In the case of children, parents are normally offered a few hundred dollars with a guarantee that their child will get a well paid job," it said. "Instead, the children are promptly deprived of their identity papers and forced into slavery."
UNICEF said that while reports had shown that trafficking of Vietnamese women and children was serious and widespread, a sufficient in-depth assessment had yet to be conducted.
It said Vietnam and China would conduct a joint survey this year both to determine the extent of the problem and to create mechanisms to rescue victims.
The UNICEF statement said more than 10,000 Chinese victims of trafficking within China itself had been rescued between 1996 and 1998 but studies showed large numbers of Chinese women continued to be forcibly transported to brothels in Cambodia and Thailand.
Reuters - March 25
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