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Hundreds of Trafficked Foreign Nationals Rescued: Malaysian Police
Date Posted: 9/25/2006

2006/9/22
KUALA LUMPUR, AFP

Police have rescued hundreds of Asian women in recent years who have been trafficked into Malaysia and forced into prostitution, the country's police chief said Thursday.
Inspector-General of Police, Musa Hassan, said the women were from countries including Indonesia, China, Thailand, Philippines and Vietnam, with Indonesians making up the highest numbers.

"For the record, 365 foreign nationals were rescued from vice operators by the Royal Malaysian Police, with the assistance of the respective embassies and NGOS from the year 2004 until June 2006," he told a conference on human trafficking in Kuala Lumpur.

The meeting gathered police, non-government organisations, diplomats and government agencies in an effort to develop an action plan to tackle the trafficking of people into Malaysia.

Musa said there was a pattern of foreign women being trafficked into Malaysia by groups or syndicates cooperating across borders, but said police were still studying whether numbers were on the increase.

"There is a pattern, but I think with our strict enforcement of the law, I think it has reduced a bit because we have identified quite a number of syndicates involved in this," Musa told reporters at the sidelines.

"I cannot say the trend, whether it is going upwards or downwards now but we are making a study of it," he added, when asked to elaborate.

He said police were targeting the financial operations of trafficking syndicates and working with their counterparts in other Southeast Asian nations to crack down on traffickers.

The Malaysian government has said it is drafting anti-trafficking laws, a move urged by police and activists at the conference, who said the existing mix of laws was inadequate to deal with the problem.

The director of the migrant rights group Tenaganita, Irene Fernandez, said the use of laws such as Malaysia's immigration act to crack down on human traffickers was also criminalising victims.

Malaysian authorities periodically round up foreign women in nightclubs and bars, who are often prosecuted using immigration laws.

"When we use vice raids, we are looking at these women as the ones who are at fault when they may not be," she told the conference.

According to a report by the International Organisation for Migration in March, trafficking victims in Malaysia are often exploited by unscrupulous labour agents.

They are frequently subjected to physical, psychological and sexual abuse by their employers, it said.

Malaysia is one of Asia's largest importers of labour with foreign workers, both legal and illegal, making up about 2.6 million of the country's 10.5 million workforce.