They argue Australia should take a broader look at why asylum seekers flee their home countries, as economic migration is often linked to human rights abuses.
Presenter: Liam Cochrane
Speaker: Professor Susan Kneebone, Monash University's Faculty of Law; author, Transnational Crime and Human Rights: Responses to Human Trafficking in the Greater Mekong Subregion
KNEEBONE: Well one of the most successful programs I would say is the COMMIT process. COMMIT stands for Coordinated Mekong Ministerial Initiative Against Trafficking, and in 2004 the countries in the region joined together and created a memorandum of understanding, an organisation known as UNIAP, which is the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on human trafficking in the Mekong sub--region. In fact is the lead agency on this project, because trafficking is an issue which occurs obviously across borders for the most part, although it also occurs internally, and no one country can really tackle the problem alone. So there has been terrific cooperation between the countries on these issues and UNIAP has really directed the shall we say dialogue on the issues towards, gradually towards a more protective approach to victims of human trafficking. Initially responses were very much 101 policing, teaching policemen to catch traffickers. But in countries where the rule of law is often quite fragile, where you don't have stable institutions, stable courts, you don't have many lawyers, it's really starting at the wrong end of things. And gradually over the years that I've been watching this issue I've seen UNIAP swing towards much more of a human rights and protection angle for victims of trafficking.
COCHRANE: So on the ground how does that manifest itself, because many of our listeners will recognise a situation where police and border authorities and various other officials are actually part of the problem rather than part of the solution, so how does tackling it from a human rights perspective actually work on the ground?
KNEEBONE: Well I think what it will do eventually when people come to realise that this is the angle to take in order to get the cooperation of trafficked victims, is that police will be more concerned with assisting the person rather than pushing them towards being a witness in a prosecution. And just to give a practical example, at the moment a lot of the protection measures in fact involve detention in shelters, they're effectively detention measures rather than rehabilitation measures. But there are some excellent shelters for example in Lao PDR there are some excellent shelters, which are in fact funded by the Japanese government where the rehabilitation does include social and psychological rehabilitation. But gradually as the message gets out attitudes will change. One of the things that governments in the region have done themselves is in fact to promote safe migration. They've realised the more people are at risk of being manipulated by others, in other words under the power of others, the people who are less empowered have less knowledge are the ones who are likely to be trafficked. And so they are in fact training people to migrate themselves safely and facilitating them in crossing borders, rather than imposing impediments.
COCHRANE: Australia has a lot of controversy at the moment about people entering the country by boat and whether they're coming for genuine asylum seeker reasons or as economic migrants. Is there anything Australia can learn in terms of the asylum seeker issue that you've come across in your research?
KNEEBONE: I do think that this issue shows that people are going to move if they have to move. That people don't willingly leave their homes, and that these people are all what we could broadly call forced migrants, they are leaving because they've got very good reasons. And I think that something the Australian government could recognise is that in fact they also have to assist people to make these journeys safely, which indeed they're doing. But then they should not be penalised when they finally get to their destination, because that is not going to work as a deterrent, people are going to move and continue to move because they have to move in order to survive.
COCHRANE: Do you think the Australian government should be more understanding of the reasons that are forcing people to migrate and not just drawing a line in the sand with human rights abuses on one side and economic factors on the other?
KNEEBONE: Absolutely, the two actually merge. Often economic reasons for moving are the result of human rights abuses, a lot of the people who are moving in the greater Mekong sub-region for example, are moving because of issues such as massive developments which unsettle their traditional ways of life. As well as it has been suggested, climate change reasons. So the economic reasons and the human rights reasons are in fact linked.
Project Childhood was recently introduced in Lao PDR through a workshop in the capital Vientiane. The 80 participants to the "Workshop on Anti 
At the launch event, Ms. Margaret Akullo, the Project Coordinator for Project Childhood (Protection Pillar), emphasized that the Protection Pillar will significantly expand the intelligence base on the closed community of travelling sex offenders to more effectively prosecute suspects who seek to sexually abuse children. UNODC will provide assistance to the four countries in SE Asia to facilitate ratification and implementation of the relevant international legal instruments. INTERPOL will give operational criminal police support and advanced technological tools to strengthen international criminal police cooperation. 
Project Childhood countries were selected on the basis of a number of factors such as: the volume of reported arrests of alleged travelling child sex offenders; a perceived lack of institutional and legislative capacity to counter the crime, and the degree of participating Government willingness to engage with the international community to take effective action. Protection Pillar activities have already begun in Cambodia and Thailand and will extend to cover Lao PDR and Viet Nam in early 2012. 
A key workshop objective was to present findings from a UNODC legal review that examined current domestic legislative frameworks in Lao PDR as they apply to travelling child sex offenders. The report, an important Protection Pillar activity, determined whether Lao PDR law and legislative frameworks met international standards and obligations and addressed key issues such as child prostitution, sexual abuse of children, child pornography, child trafficking, child protection measures and International cooperation. 
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