BBC News - Vietnam's lost children in labyrinth of slave labour

Source: BBC News

Last year, three teenage boys jumped out of a third-floor window in Ho Chi Minh City and ran as fast as they could until they found help. It was one in the morning and they did not know where they were going.

"I was really scared someone would catch us," recalled Hieu, 18.

Hieu, who did not want to give his real name, is from the Khmu ethnic minority. He grew up in a small village in Dien Bien, a mountainous area in north-western Vietnam, one of the country's poorest provinces and bordering China.

Continue:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-23631923

Vietnam's Trade of Underaged Species - NYTimes.com

Source: NYTimes.com

HO CHI MINH CITY — “It’s basic police work,” said Michael Brosowskidescribing his activities with the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation, a nongovernmental agency that rescues children working in sweatshops in Vietnam. When it learns about a case of child labor, workers for the agency scout out suspected factories, snoop around posing as, say, electricians, and keep getaway cars on hand.

Continue: 
http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/vietnams-trade-of-underaged-species/?src=recg

Vietnamese Trapped in ‘Murky’ Trafficking Syndicates in Russia

http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam/trafficking-04222013184538.html

Source: Radio Free Asia

By Rachel Vandenbrink

2013-04-22

A file photo of a poster in a street in Ho Chi Minh City appealing to people to be vigilant against human trafficking.

 AFP

The re   

The recent case of 15 Vietnamese women trapped in a Moscow sex-trafficking ring underscores a larger problem of human trafficking involving thousands of Vietnamese in Russia, according to a rights group.

Many of the Vietnamese are held captive by their own compatriots who run several thousand sweatshops and brothels in and around the Russian capital, according to anti-trafficking advocacy group Coalition to Abolish Modern-day Slavery in Asia (CAMSA).

The U.S.-based CAMSA recently disclosed the plight of the 15 women who fell prey to a Vietnamese run sex trafficking ring in Russia which it charged had operated with the help of the Vietnamese embassy in Moscow.

After public exposure to the case prompted the brothel owner to let the women go in batches over the past month, the last of the 15 women returned home to Vietnam on Friday, CAMSA co-founder Nguyen Dinh Thang told RFA.

But the trafficker who brought them there and forced them into sex slavery remains at large, and Russian police have been “very slow” in responding to the case, he said.

Vietnamese-run sweatshops and brothels

CAMSA estimates Moscow has 3,000 Vietnamese-run sweatshops, each employing from a few to over a hundred workers, many of them victims of forced labor.

The city also has “numerous” brothels run by Vietnamese—serving mostly Vietnamese clients—where young women from the country are forced into prostitution after being lured to Russia with employment offers, Thang said.

He said he has personally worked on six cases involving some 300 Vietnamese victims of labor and sex trafficking trapped in Russia since last year.

“This experience would shine some light on the highly complex and murky human trafficking situation in this vast country,” he said at a U.S. congressional hearing on human trafficking last week.

“Vietnamese victims of human trafficking in Russia have practically no chance of finding freedom,” he said.

“The existing system in Russia makes it practically impossible for victims to escape and seek help."

Police 'complicity'

About half of the identified victims that CAMSA has tried to rescue over the past 18 months are still trapped by their traffickers.

Many of those who ran away from the sweatshops have been returned to their traffickers by Russian police, who have close links to traffickers, according to Thang.

“The syndicates that traffic them do so almost openly, counting on the complicity of the local police,” Thang said.

None of the cases that the group has brought to the attention of Russian authorities have been identified by the Russian government as human trafficking cases.

The Vietnamese government estimates that 30 percent of the 10,000 Vietnamese migrant workers in Russia traveled on an official labor export program and the rest made their own way on tourist visas, indicating some 7,000 are working there illegally.

But CAMSA estimates that figure is just the tip of the iceberg.

“We believe the actual number is many times higher,” Thang said.

Aside from being a destination country for people trafficked from Vietnam and other countries, Russia is also a source and transit country in the movement of trafficked victims, while Vietnam is also a destination country for people trafficked from around Southeast Asia, officials and rights groups say.

On the U.S. State Department’s annual global report on human trafficking last year,  Russia was rated a  “Tier 2 Watch List” country – a designation for countries in danger of falling down to the Tier 3 blacklist of countries that do not comply with minimum standards for addressing human trafficking.

Vietnam was upgraded last year from a “Tier 2 Watch List” to “Tier 2” ranking.

Related articles

• Administration targets human traffickers
• BBC News - Human trafficking victims will no longer be prosecuted, say police
• How human trafficking happens all around us

Four get 27 years in jail for trafficking women | Tuổi Trẻ news

http://tuoitrenews.vn/society/8048/four-get-27-years-in-jail-for-trafficking-women

Source:  Tuổi Trẻ news

03/19/2013

 Image
http://123.30.128.19/i/s500/2013/03/NXF1bzjY.jpg

A southern Tay Ninh Province court has sentenced four people for trafficking 11 young Vietnamese women to China and Malaysia as future wives for local men.

In a hearing opened on Monday, the local People’s Court sentenced Truong Bac Siu, 47, of Dong Nai Province, to 12 years in prison, while Pham Thi My Le, 43, of Tay Ninh’s Go Dau District, and Ho Ngoc Xuan, 38, also of Go Dau, were given sentences of 10 and 7 years, respectively.

The fourth defendant, Le Ngoc Lan, Xuan’s husband, was given a suspended 3-year sentence since the couple has an infant child with cerebral palsy.

All four were charged with “human trafficking” and they must submit all the money they had earned from their crime, the court said.

According to the indictment from the local prosecutor’s office, Tay Ninh police caught Siu and Le carrying out procedures at HCMC’s Tan Son Nhat Airport for three young women to leave Vietnam for China on October 20, 2012.

After being arrested, Sui and Le told police that they had successfully lured 11 other Vietnamese women and sent them to China and Malaysia illegally.

After arriving in China or Malaysia, these women were received by two Vietnamese people, named Lam and Lien, who would arrange to sell them as possible wives to local men, the traffickers said.
A similar case was also tried by the same court in July 2012, when a four-person ring was tried for luring and selling 16 Vietnamese women to China as future wives for Chinese men.

Tran Thi Lan, the ring's leader, got 14 years imprisonment, while the others were sentenced to 10 years, 7 years, and 2 years and six months in prison.
The ring members had lied to these young women that they were able to provide good jobs to any woman who agreed to go to China under their arrangement. But, in fact, they sold their victims to Chinese men.

The court ordered the four defendants to pay total damage of VND100 million (US$4,800) to their victims.

A month later, in August 2012, the provincial police cracked down on another ring, also comprising of four members, who had sold 21 Vietnamese women as wives to Chinese men.

The ring was led by a couple, Nguyen Tan Nho and his wife, Tran Le Thuy, both 48, who were arrested after police caught the couple carrying out procedures for two girls to fly from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi.

Children rescued from slave labour in Vietnam factory | Herald Sun

Source: Herald Sun

Last Updated: October 01, 2011

TWENTY-THREE children and young adults rescued from slave labour in a garment factory by Vietnamese authorities with the help of an Australian-run children's charity have arrived in Hanoi.

Vietnamese government officials and police from the victims' home region, with help from the charity Blue Dragon, raided the factory in Ho Chi Minh City. The owners have been arrested and are awaiting trial.

The victims, aged from 10 to 21, are from the Kho Mu ethnic group, in Dien Bien province in Vietnam's far northwest. Some of them had been working for up to two years as slave labour in the garment business.

Tired but happy, the children relaxed for an hour at Noi Bai airport before boarding a bus for the 12-hour journey home to their villages.

The group told AAP they were looking forward to returning to their families.

"I felt so homesick, living in Saigon," said 12-year-old Trang.

He was taken by car from his small village of 35 households and brought to Saigon, where he worked cutting cloth and was regularly beaten, he said.

He couldn't estimate how many hours he worked as he can't read a clock.

Gazing fixedly at his can of Fanta, he said he wanted to get home to his parents and six younger brothers and family farm.

Ta Ngoc Van, a lawyer with Blue Dragon, travelled to the remote villages of Da Lech and Co Nghiu some weeks ago following up a tip from a contact in the Ministry of Public Security about rumours of missing children.

He found some families hadn't seen their children in two years.

They'd been approached by traffickers who promised their children well-paid and comfortable jobs in Ho Chi Minh City.

After receiving almost no money and no contact, the families were desperate. Investigations by Blue Dragon, experienced in saving children from garment factories, and Vietnamese officials located the children.

Michael Brosowski, the Australian founder of the charity, said local authorities were extremely interested in combating child trafficking.
Legislation in Vietnam, however, needs to catch up.

Vietnam is rated as a Tier 2 Watch List nation in a worldwide report on human trafficking released by the US State Department this year.

Most human trafficking recognised by the government and NGOs related to cross-border trafficking, often for sex work.
Internal trafficking, usually for labour, is harder to define and rarely prosecuted. According to the US report, no one was prosecuted for trafficking persons in Vietnam last year.

"It's not sexy enough (as an issue) compared to sex trafficking," said Brosowski.

"But labour trafficking can be hideous as well. These children lose years of their lives," he said.

According to the State Department report, Vietnam's legal structure is ill-suited to support the identification and prosecution of trafficking cases.

As internal trafficking can be hard to prove, some cases are prosecuted under labour laws instead.

Authorities have not yet said how they plan to prosecute this case.

Related articles

• Labour trafficking, not sex trafficking needs more attention - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) (trafficking-monitor.blogspot.com)
• Police raid Travellers' site to free men 'kept as slaves' for 15 years - Crime, UK - The Independent (trafficking-monitor.blogspot.com)
• China child-trafficking raids free 89 (cbc.ca)