By Lauren Crothers
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia
A Cambodian court has charged two men with human trafficking for trying to smuggle 23 people into Thailand, as thousands of workers return to the neighboring country having initially fled the junta’s strict post-coup policy.
The provincial court in Koh Kong province, which abuts Thailand, laid the charges after border police thwarted the pair’s attempt to shuttle the would-be workers, who paid $50 each, into Thailand, according to a report in The Cambodia Daily newspaper Monday.
The charges carry a maximum prison sentence of 15 years.
In June, amid fears of a crackdown on undocumented workers in the wake of the May 22 military coup in Thailand, at least 240,000 people flooded across the border back to Cambodia.
Between 2-3 million migrants - mostly from Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos - work in Thailand, providing the bulk of manpower in economic sectors, in particular, fishing, seafood and construction industries where Thais are no longer economically willing to work.
They are usually paid between 33-50 percent of the average Thai salaries for the sector, but according to aid organizations half of them work illegally. Most arrived in Thailand when the demand for foreign labor was high due to a booming economy.
Since June, many have returned from Cambodia to Thailand, though a report released last week by Human Rights Watch warned of squalid conditions in Thai immigration detention centers, stressing the vulnerability of children, in particular, if they accompany their migrant worker parents.
A copy of the U.S. State Department’s ‘Trafficking in Persons Report,’ which was released in June, puts Cambodia on what it calls “tier two” on its scale of countries - with tier three being the worst.
It said Cambodia has “failed to make progress in holding trafficking offenders accountable,” prosecuting 35 cases in 2013 - down from 44 cases in 2012.
Cambodia continues to be used as a “source, transit and destination country for men, women and children subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking,” the report added.
Officials from Cambodia’s Ministry of Interior’s anti-human trafficking department could not be reached, but The Cambodia Daily has reported at least eight cases of human trafficking this year.
In August alone, four people were tried, five jailed and another charged in cases of human trafficking.
In July, two people were tried and in May, four people in two separate cases were convicted of sending Cambodian women to China under false pretences.
A man was also arrested in February after he tried to smuggle 15 people into Thailand, while a case opened in April against a Taiwanese company that was allegedly sending men to work in slave-like conditions on fishing trawlers in African waters.
www.aa.com.tr/en
