From Vietnam News Agency

HA NOI — More and more Vietnamese women and children are being sold into slavery by human traffickers, said Deputy Prime Minister Truong Vinh Trong yesterday at a national workshop in Ha Noi.

Nearly 6,000 Vietnamese women and children have been sold as cheap labour or prostitutes in foreign countries, according to reports released by the Ministry of Public Security.

Another 8,000 are suspected to have been smuggled out of the country illegally by traffickers.

Deputy Minister of Public Security Le The Tiem said the number of human smugglers that were caught increased by 72 per cent in 2006 when compared to statistics from 2005.

The number of victims also rose by a staggering 140 per cent.

In addition, the ministry believes many of the 136,000 marriages between foreigners and Vietnamese women are connected to human smuggling rings and mail-order bride schemes.

The ministry said young boys and even men are also targets because they can be used in sweatshops and paid virtually nothing for their work, if they get a salary at all.

Over the last two years, Viet Nam investigated nearly 600 human trafficking cases involving more than 1,500 women and child victims. An estimated 1,300 of those were safely returned to their homes. Some 122 were solved through diplomatic means.

Traffickers transported their victims out of the country via roads and highways. Some of the youth even ended up as adoptive children for childless families, said Tiem

Most of the smuggling rings were run by transnational criminals that make huge profits from their crimes. They targeted unemployed women and poor children from rural areas by promising to find them work or rich husbands, he said.

The Deputy PM urged the ministry to address this issue by working out a plan of action from 2007 to 2010.

Participants at the workshop discussed potential solutions to human trafficking including: raising awareness via mass media; training local awareness counselors; encouraging people to protect themselves and expose smugglers; drafting new laws to prevent human trafficking; asking the National Assembly to ratify international conventions and protocols related to the issue; improving information exchanges between domestic authorities; strengthening international co-operation in fighting these crimes; helping them find victims and help them integrate into their communities and stepping up investigations to bring their captures to justice. —VNS