For the second year in a row, Vietnam’s ranking improved in the United States’ annual Trafficking in Persons report, and the country is no longer considered among Asia’s worst for human trafficking, a list that includes the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Cambodia, Myanmar and North Korea.
The June 2024 report from the U.S. State Department focuses on the growing use of technology to facilitate trafficking, including using social media for online scams.
In 2023, the report also cited Vietnam’s efforts to tamp down on the crime after noting
surges the year before in sex trafficking and kidnappings linked to cyber-scam operations.
Vietnam is now on the report’s “Tier 2” list, which includes countries making “significant efforts” to meet standards for eradicating trafficking.
Vietnam’s government has “demonstrated overall increasing efforts” to fight trafficking, including submitting a new draft of an anti-trafficking law to its legislature and increasing the prosecution of traffickers, according to the latest report.
North Korea and the PRC remained in the “Tier 3” category, which includes countries that do not meet anti-trafficking standards “and are not making significant efforts to do so.” The report noted that Beijing made limited efforts to counter human trafficking, including raising awareness of online scams and cooperating with foreign law enforcement after Chinese nationals were accused of trafficking.
However, widespread forced labor programs, including those targeting Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, kept the PRC among the worst offenders. The report also cited the use of forced labor in projects funded by the PRC’s One Belt, One Road infrastructure scheme.
Officials underscored the role of cyber-scam compounds in Southeast Asia, where human trafficking victims are forced to perpetrate online fraud. Cambodia and Myanmar, where experts say trafficking is rampant to staff such compounds, also remained among the worst-ranked countries.
The report stated “corruption and official complicity” in Cambodia, where forced scam compounds are rife, meant that authorities were not only failing to counteract human trafficking but were facilitating it.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken cited the rise of cyber-scam centers as the biggest threat to global anti-trafficking efforts, with the industry now worth billions of dollars and more people being tricked into captivity.
He cited a case where people in Southeast Asia answered online job ads, only to be “taken to an isolated guarded compound in Burma, where the phones were confiscated” and they were forced to carry out romance scams to swindle people into sending cryptocurrency.
The increasing number of people falling victim to such criminal operations across Asia each year disproves the “false but widely held notion that trafficking only affects women and girls,” Blinken said.
