NGO cites Hong Kong as hub for sex trafficking of children and youth

A Security Bureau (SB) spokesman has denied a claim by an NGO that the city is at high risk for human trafficking, especially sex trafficking of children and young people. The SB spokesman said, "Hong Kong is neither a destination for human trafficking nor a place of origin for exporting illegal immigrants."

The spokesman was responding to a report by ECPAT, or End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes, which addressed Hong Kong as a transit point and destination for child trafficking at a Friday press conference.

"We attach great importance to combating human trafficking. Over the years, cases of human trafficking detected are rare," Ma Hing-lap, principal information officer of the Security Bureau, told China Daily. He said statistics posted on the SB official website show that human trafficking cases over the last five years were three (2005), three (2005), four (2007), one (2008) and two (2009).

The conclusion that Hong Kong is a trafficking hub is drawn in part from the 2008 Human Rights Report: China (including Tibet, Hong Kong, and Macao). The report, issued by the US State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, said "Hong Kong was a point of transit and destination for a small number of persons trafficked for sexual exploitation from the Mainland and Southeast Asia."

Explaining the warning, Mark Capaldi, ECPAT'S deputy director of programs, declared that the SAR is located in East Asia, which is the world's second worst region for trafficking in children, and is very close to human trafficking centers of the Pacific, including Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Last year's economic crisis also put the city at a greater risk to become human trafficking hub, as the poor economic conditions forced woman and children in poor countries to go abroad in wealthy places, such as Hong Kong, according to Capaldi.

"Hong Kong has not adopted a specific policy framework to adequately address the issue of child trafficking in the region," said Capaldi. "Limited measures have been identified to ensure the specific rights of child victims of trafficking."

Legislative difficulty dose exist. The SAR government admitted that it was difficult to identify trafficking victims from among the larger group of illegal immigrants, according the US 2008 Human Rights Report.

Dr Patrick Cheung, chairman of Against Child Abuse Limited (ACA), told China Daily that "though we are not sure about whether trafficking in children and young people is serious or not in the SAR, what we can say is that citizens are seriously lacking awareness on the severity of the issue."

Cheung told China Daily that the hotline provided by ACA has never received a single help call from victims in the past 30 years.

With a joint effort of ACA and ECPAT, a global campaign of Stop Sex Trafficking of Children and Young People was launched in Hong Kong Friday, in the hope of achieving greater public awareness of the issue.

China Daily

(HK Edition 08/07/2010 page1)