Australia yesterday launched a new A$80 million (US$54.8 million) program to help Southeast Asian nations combat human trafficking.
Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Marise Payne said that the 10-year program was an extension of Canberra’s assistance to the region to tackle the menace in the past 15 years.
Australia has helped train more than 13,000 judicial officials who bolstered their legal systems to fight human trafficking and ensure better protection for victims in 10-member ASEAN, she said.
Payne said at the launch of the program with her ASEAN counterparts that the bloc has made progress with the 2015 launch of its own action plan to combat trafficking, especially in women and children, but deeper cooperation was required as the scale of the challenge remained “immense.”
“There are many deep-rooted factors that enable transnational crime, from corruption through to the unequal status of women and children and other vulnerable groups,” Payne said. “Our partnership with ASEAN on human trafficking continues to grow, promoting a fairer and more just region.”
Millions of Philippine and Indonesian nationals work abroad, while a crackdown on minority Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar has led to hundreds of thousands fleeing to Bangladesh and other neighboring countries, making them prey to traffickers.
The International Organization for Migration said that out of about 7,000 victims of trafficking that it assisted globally in 2015, one-fourth were from ASEAN countries.
The US Department of State’s annual report on human trafficking said that the problem is massive, with Myanmar in the worst tier for failing to protect Rohingya from violence in Rakhine State.
Rohingya were subject to exploitation, with some children abducted in transit and girls sold into forced marriages in India, Indonesia and Malaysia, it said.
The UN has described the violence that drove Myanmar security forces to commit mass rapes, killings and arson as “ethnic cleansing.”
Payne expressed Australia’s concern over the situation in Rakhine.
Australia is committed to working with Myanmar, Bangladesh and the region to seek a durable solution to the Rohingya crisis, she said.
ASEAN ministers in a joint communique on Wednesday voiced hope that an investigative body set up by the Burmese government would seek accountability through an impartial investigation into the alleged human rights violations.
They stressed the need to address the root causes of the conflict and for the proper factors to be in place for Rohingya to return home.
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