Following a human trafficking scandal, Rohingya migrants sit on the floor, May 9, 2015, at the authority’s district office of Rattaphum, Songkla province, southern Thailand, as they were found abandoned in Khao Kaew mountain near the Thai-Malaysia border.
For the second year in a row, Vietnam’s ranking in the U.S. State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons report has improved, and the country is now clear of some of Asia’s worst human trafficking locales, including China, Cambodia, Myanmar and North Korea.
The report was released on Monday in Washington, with officials focussing on the growing use of technology in facilitating trafficking, including the use of social media for online scam operations.
Cambodia and Vietnam both fell to the worst “Tier 3” category in the 2022 report amid surges in sex trafficking and kidnappings linked to cyber-scam operations, but Vietnam last year was upgraded to “Tier 2 watchlist” as officials made some efforts to tamp down on the crime.
Vietnam was again upgraded this year and now sits in the regular “Tier 2” list, which includes countries that do not yet meet the State Department’s standards for eradicating trafficking but that “are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance.”
“Tier 2 watchlist,” meanwhile, refers to countries where the numbers of victims are increasing with few efforts to combat trafficking, and “Tier 3” refers to countries that do not meet the report’s standards to eradicate human trafficking “and are not making significant efforts to do so.”
In Asia and the Pacific, the “Tier 3” list includes China, North Korea, Myanmar, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Macau, Papua New Guinea and Brunei, all of which have been in the category for many years.
The report says Vietnam was upgraded out of the “Tier 2 watchlist” because its government had “demonstrated overall increasing efforts” to fight trafficking, including submitting a new draft of an anti-trafficking law to its legislature and increasing the prosecution of traffickers.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivers remarks during the release of the 2024 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, June 24, 2024 at the State Department in Washington. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Reuters)
But it says the country still does not meet the standards of “Tier 1” countries, noting among other things that a senior diplomat accused of facilitating trafficking of Vietnamese nationals to Saudi Arabia in 2021 had a case against him dropped and was given a new job.
“North Korean nationals working in Vietnam may be operating under exploitative working conditions and display multiple indicators of forced labor,” it adds, also noting that Cuban doctors working in Vietnam may have also been forced into the roles by the Cuban government.
Worst human traffickers
China remained in the worst “Tier 3” category, even as the report noted that Beijing had made external efforts to counter human trafficking.
“Despite the lack of significant [domestic] efforts, the government took some steps to address trafficking, including by raising awareness of the risk of forced labor in online scam operations in Southeast Asia,” it says, praising Chinese authorities for “cooperating with foreign law enforcement” where Chinese nationals were accused of trafficking.
Still, the “widespread forced labor” programs targeting Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang and the use of forced labor in Belt and Road Initiative programs kept China in the “Tier 3” category.
Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, dismissed the evaluation of China as “political lies and ideological bias” and said the situation in Xinjiang was “not about human rights” but “about countering violent terrorism, radicalization and separatism.”
“The Chinese government attaches high importance to cracking down on human trafficking and has achieved notable results. The U.S. has no authority to act as a judge on human rights,” Liu said, accusing the United States of using “human rights as a cover” to attack China.
“Some anti-China forces have been fabricating and spreading groundless disinformation about Xinjiang by distorting facts to smear China’s image, vilify its Xinjiang policy and meddle in its internal affairs in an attempt to fool the world,” he told Radio Free Asia.
Separately, Cambodia and Myanmar, which form part of the epicenter of the rampant problem of forced cyber-scam compounds in Southeast Asia, also continued to languish in the bottom-most category.
The report says that “corruption and official complicity” in Cambodia, where forced scam compounds are rife, meant that authorities were not only failing to counteract human trafficking but were facilitating it.
Samson Inocencio Jr. of the Philippines poses for a photo with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken after receiving a certificate honoring their work combatting human trafficking during a ceremony marking the release of the 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report, June 24, 2024, at the State Department in Washington. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Reuters)
“Officials actively impeded countervailing efforts, including reportedly undermining anti-trafficking law enforcement and victim protection efforts and dispelling reported accusations through minimization and denial in public messaging,” the report says.
Forced scamming
Speaking at the report’s launch, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken cited the rise of cyber-scam compounds as the biggest growing threat to global anti-trafficking efforts, with the industry now worth billions of dollars and more and more regular people being tricked into captivity.
He spoke about a case where people in Southeast Asia answering online job ads were “taken to an isolated guarded compound in Burma, where the phones were confiscated” and they were forced to carry out romance scams to swindle people into sending cryptocurrency.
“One trafficking survivor, a chemical engineer from India, told a reporter that he was locked in a cell and starved until he agreed to take part in the scams,” he said. “This practice of combining human trafficking with cyber scamming is becoming more and more common.”
The increasing numbers of people falling victim to such criminal operations across Asia each year disproved “false but widely held notion that trafficking only affects women and girls,” he added. (RFA)
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June 26, 2024
Vietnam improves in US human trafficking report
by Defend the Defenders • [Human Rights]
Following a human trafficking scandal, Rohingya migrants sit on the floor, May 9, 2015, at the authority’s district office of Rattaphum, Songkla province, southern Thailand, as they were found abandoned in Khao Kaew mountain near the Thai-Malaysia border.
For the second year in a row, Vietnam’s ranking in the U.S. State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons report has improved, and the country is now clear of some of Asia’s worst human trafficking locales, including China, Cambodia, Myanmar and North Korea.
The report was released on Monday in Washington, with officials focussing on the growing use of technology in facilitating trafficking, including the use of social media for online scam operations.
Cambodia and Vietnam both fell to the worst “Tier 3” category in the 2022 report amid surges in sex trafficking and kidnappings linked to cyber-scam operations, but Vietnam last year was upgraded to “Tier 2 watchlist” as officials made some efforts to tamp down on the crime.
Vietnam was again upgraded this year and now sits in the regular “Tier 2” list, which includes countries that do not yet meet the State Department’s standards for eradicating trafficking but that “are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance.”
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“Tier 2 watchlist,” meanwhile, refers to countries where the numbers of victims are increasing with few efforts to combat trafficking, and “Tier 3” refers to countries that do not meet the report’s standards to eradicate human trafficking “and are not making significant efforts to do so.”
In Asia and the Pacific, the “Tier 3” list includes China, North Korea, Myanmar, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Macau, Papua New Guinea and Brunei, all of which have been in the category for many years.
The report says Vietnam was upgraded out of the “Tier 2 watchlist” because its government had “demonstrated overall increasing efforts” to fight trafficking, including submitting a new draft of an anti-trafficking law to its legislature and increasing the prosecution of traffickers.
But it says the country still does not meet the standards of “Tier 1” countries, noting among other things that a senior diplomat accused of facilitating trafficking of Vietnamese nationals to Saudi Arabia in 2021 had a case against him dropped and was given a new job.
“North Korean nationals working in Vietnam may be operating under exploitative working conditions and display multiple indicators of forced labor,” it adds, also noting that Cuban doctors working in Vietnam may have also been forced into the roles by the Cuban government.
Worst human traffickers
China remained in the worst “Tier 3” category, even as the report noted that Beijing had made external efforts to counter human trafficking.
“Despite the lack of significant [domestic] efforts, the government took some steps to address trafficking, including by raising awareness of the risk of forced labor in online scam operations in Southeast Asia,” it says, praising Chinese authorities for “cooperating with foreign law enforcement” where Chinese nationals were accused of trafficking.
Still, the “widespread forced labor” programs targeting Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang and the use of forced labor in Belt and Road Initiative programs kept China in the “Tier 3” category.
Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, dismissed the evaluation of China as “political lies and ideological bias” and said the situation in Xinjiang was “not about human rights” but “about countering violent terrorism, radicalization and separatism.”
“The Chinese government attaches high importance to cracking down on human trafficking and has achieved notable results. The U.S. has no authority to act as a judge on human rights,” Liu said, accusing the United States of using “human rights as a cover” to attack China.
“Some anti-China forces have been fabricating and spreading groundless disinformation about Xinjiang by distorting facts to smear China’s image, vilify its Xinjiang policy and meddle in its internal affairs in an attempt to fool the world,” he told Radio Free Asia.
Separately, Cambodia and Myanmar, which form part of the epicenter of the rampant problem of forced cyber-scam compounds in Southeast Asia, also continued to languish in the bottom-most category.
The report says that “corruption and official complicity” in Cambodia, where forced scam compounds are rife, meant that authorities were not only failing to counteract human trafficking but were facilitating it.
“Officials actively impeded countervailing efforts, including reportedly undermining anti-trafficking law enforcement and victim protection efforts and dispelling reported accusations through minimization and denial in public messaging,” the report says.
Forced scamming
Speaking at the report’s launch, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken cited the rise of cyber-scam compounds as the biggest growing threat to global anti-trafficking efforts, with the industry now worth billions of dollars and more and more regular people being tricked into captivity.
He spoke about a case where people in Southeast Asia answering online job ads were “taken to an isolated guarded compound in Burma, where the phones were confiscated” and they were forced to carry out romance scams to swindle people into sending cryptocurrency.
“One trafficking survivor, a chemical engineer from India, told a reporter that he was locked in a cell and starved until he agreed to take part in the scams,” he said. “This practice of combining human trafficking with cyber scamming is becoming more and more common.”
The increasing numbers of people falling victim to such criminal operations across Asia each year disproved “false but widely held notion that trafficking only affects women and girls,” he added. (RFA)