Southeast Asian countries step up efforts to combat sexual crimes against children

As Southeast Asian countries grow more interconnected and telecommunications and air travel become more affordable, the opportunities for sex offenders to access child victims will expand. Therefore, child protection measures must be integrated. With this aim, officials of justice ministries of Cambodia, Laos PDR, Thailand and Viet Nam shared legal research findings and recommendations to strengthen laws, law enforcement and international cooperation to protect children from transnational sex offenders.

In 2012, Viet Nam leads the idea to establish this Regional Legal Research Group during a UNODC Project Childhood meeting on law enforcement cooperation in combating child sexual exploitation in travel and tourism. Since then, members of this regional group have rotated hosting annual meetings to share the latest trends and developments in legislation and implementation to address child sex offending.

UNODC has supported the establishment and convening of the Regional Legal Research Group, which focuses on sexual exploitation of children in travel and tourism and online. This unique group supports the adoption of legal frameworks, the harmonization of child protection laws, and the sharing of knowledge on the effectiveness of particular legislative and policy approaches.

"The legal and judicial reforms are in the centre of anti-child sex tourism efforts of the Governments of Cambodia, Laos PDR, Thailand and Viet Nam. The current revisions of the Penal Code and Criminal Procedure Code, as well as of other relevant legislation in Viet Nam were aimed at strengthening the legal basis for fighting against the sexual exploitation of children." – Mr. Christopher Batt, UNODC Viet Nam Officer-in-charge said.

The heads of delegations from Cambodia, Laos PDR, Thailand and Viet Nam all reiterate the cross-border complexity of this form of transnational crime and the urgency in strengthening cooperation in the ASEAN region to prevent and combat the crime. Representatives from Cambodia, Laos PDR, Thailand and Viet Nam also present the overview of the situation of child sex offences and preliminary legal research findings; discuss recommendations of the research and map and agree on areas of mutual interest for future collaboration.

"If there is not any cooperation, we cannot combat to this serious crime effectively. Therefore, the meeting provides good opportunities for representatives from Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Viet Nam, the international and local organizations to revise the situation and legal framework related to this crime, to identify the gaps as well as to agree on the collaboration opportunities in legal research related to sexual exploitation of children in travel and tourism." – said Ms. Nguyen Thi Kim Thoa, Director General, Department of Criminal and Administrati veLaw, Ministry of Justice of Viet Nam.

Responses to child sex offending require more than comprehensive laws. In the UNODC report, "Protecting the Future: Improving the Response to Child Sex Offending in Southeast Asia", the need for developing law and justice frameworks is joined with the need to boost law enforcement capacity and shift attitudes of criminal justice officers. Through standardized material and training, UNODC ensures that criminal officials in the project countries share a common knowledge base enriched with rights-based, victim-centered, and child-friendly approaches for investigations and prosecutions that span across borders.

For more information, please contact:

• Ms. Le Thi Ngoc, UNODC Communications Officer, Email: ngoc.le@unodc.org