Asian crisis leaves women, kids vulnerable to trafficking

Asian crisis leaves women, kids vulnerable to trafficking

BANGKOK (AP): Asia's economic crisis has left women and children seeking work outside their own countries more vulnerable than ever to prostitution and human-trafficking gangs, experts said on Thursday.

Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai urged a conference on illegal migration to draft a framework for better international cooperation, reflecting the era of the globalized economy, to control undocumented workers and the criminals who prey on them.

"They are, in reality, also victims," Chuan said of illegal migrants. "We should not lose sight of the fact that all migrants are human beings -- as such, their rights and dignity should be protected."

The three-day International Symposium on Migration, jointly sponsored by Thailand and the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration, brought together representatives from 30 countries and dozens of non-governmental organizations.

Delegates from Europe, the Americas and Africa were invited to share their experiences with Asia on coping with illegal immigration.

Before recession struck much of Asia in 1997, countries with booming economies like Thailand attracted floods of workers from their poorer neighbors. They were in demand with employers because they worked for cheaper wages and had no social protections.

They were less welcome with governments when times grew tough, however, leading to violence in Malaysia and Singapore against poor Indonesian migrants and mass expulsions of Myanmar people from Thailand last year.

Many have gone home as jobs dried up, but others have been driven further underground, where they are increasingly vulnerable to abuse.

"Common sense tells you that when the economy turns bad, people look for other sources of income and trafficking in prostitution goes up," Brunson McKinley, director general of the IOM, told reporters.

IOM officials said it was difficult to estimate how many undocumented migrants were traveling between countries at any time, but more than half are women. Many are vulnerable to prostitution gangs.

Philip Ruddock, Australia's minister for immigration, said that there were increasing cases of women being lured to Australia with the promise of jobs and ending up in brothels.

Austria and Italy have been pushing for an international convention that would make trafficking in people a worldwide crime. No such convention exists.

McKinley called the lack of such a convention "one of the last unfinished bits of the human-rights agenda."