Ministry, NGOs Meet Over Trafficking Report
Ministry of Interior officials held a closed-door meeting Monday with NGO representatives to contest Cambodia’s recent downgrade on the U.S. State Department’s Global Trafficking in Persons Report, which the ministry will discuss in a meeting with the U.S. Embassy this week. The annual report, released last month, moved Cambodia from Tier 2, where it had been for the past three years, down to the Tier 2 Watch List. … According to the latest report, Cambodia’s ranking was downgraded this year because fewer trafficking offenders were prosecuted in 2012 and no efforts were made to address corruption within the government that fuels human trafficking. Present at the meeting, which was presided over by Secretary of State Chou Bun Eng, were the U.N. Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP), the International Organization for Migration, the Association of Cambodian Recruitment Agencies (ACRA), Caram, Legal Support for Children and Women (LSCW) and Winrock International. … Joel Preston, consultant for the Community Legal Education Center (CLEC)—which worked to repatriate more than 700 trafficked victims last year—said CLEC’s caseload increased by 1,000 percent in 2012 due to the trafficking of Cambodians to Thailand to work in a seafood-processing factory. …
http://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/ministry-ngos-meet-over-trafficking-report-32932/
