Research pinpoints exactly which laws are broken along the trafficking chain
BANGKOK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - When an Indonesian woman arrived in Hong Kong to work as a domestic servant, her employment agency took away her documents and she was subjected to 17-hour work days and repeated physical and sexual abuse for a pittance of a salary.
The scenario is a familiar one to those working to combat human trafficking in Asia, but less understood is that this one case could involve 52 breaches of Hong Kong's laws, according to a new study.
Research by Liberty Asia, a Hong Kong-based charity, and six law firms, to be released on Tuesday, pinpoints exactly which laws are broken along the trafficking chain with the aim of improving rates of prosecution.
"The idea was to educate people about the complexity of the crime but also that there are different ways of pursuing justice," Archana Sinha Kotecha, head of legal at Liberty Asia, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from Hong Kong.
"If you can't get a trafficking in persons offence because you're struggling on the evidence threshold ... think about bribery, corruption or anti-money laundering."
There were more than 20 million victims of trafficking in 2013 alone, according to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, yet in that year there were fewer than 10,000 reported prosecutions, according to Liberty Asia.
"Much remains to be done to hold traffickers accountable for their actions and to secure justice for survivors of human slavery," said the study by Liberty Asia which partnered with six law firms after being linked up by the TrustLaw division of the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The research lists an array of laws that are broken during each step of the most common forms of trafficking in Hong Kong, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar.
In the case of the Indonesian woman trafficked to Hong Kong, breaches of the law in Hong Kong could range from possession of someone else's identity card and criminal intimidation to failure to grant rest days and indecent assault.
The research praised Thailand for having some of the most comprehensive anti-trafficking legislation in Southeast Asia, but added that did not guarantee better prosecution rates.
In June, Thailand was downgraded to the lowest status in the U.S. State Department's 2014 Trafficking in Persons Report for not fully complying with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.
"Even if you have a state-of-the-art legal framework, unless enforcement breathes life into it, it can be of no avail to the victims," Kotecha said.
Kotecha said corruption and bribery in Southeast Asia are a major impediment to enforcing the laws and many victims of trafficking face discrimination by the authorities.
"If you're a minority, a foreign migrant, you escaped persecution somewhere else and you arrived illegally or undocumented ... the chance that anyone would apply the law for your benefit is very remote," she said.
(Reporting By Thin Lei Win; Editing by Ros Russell)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
