CHINA AND MYANMAR AUTHORITIES JOIN FORCES TO COMBAT CROSS-BORDER TRAFFICKING
Senior officials hold meeting and make joint field visit to border areas. UNICEF Representative to Myanmar, Mr Ramesh Shrestha, spoke at this meeting of the great efforts made by the Chinese Government to combat cross-border trafficking, including through a project model developed with the Government of Vietnam.” By learning from lessons and best practices…” he said, “Myanmar and China could develop a ground-breaking cross-border collaboration to protect the lives of many girls and women on both sides of the border.”
Cross-border trafficking has been expanding in recent years mainly from Myanmar to China to provide rural men with wives, although victims have also been trafficked into China's underground sex industry. The value of cooperation is shown by the fact that China police have in recent years rescued over 100 victims and returned them to Myanmar, with 23 of the victims rescued from Anhui province alone in 2005. The Myanmar authorities, for their part, used information provided from the China side to crack-down on 16 suspected traffickers UNICEF Representative to China, Dr Yin Yin Nwe, paid tribute in her address to the many organizations now supporting anti-trafficking programmes, including Worldvision, Save the Children, the UNODC , ARTIP and the UN Inter-Agency Project on Trafficking, of which UNICEF was a proud member. “This accumulation of experience and expertise”, she went on, “placed a major premium on high level of coordination, as had been so clearly evidenced also at today's event.”
The meeting was followed by a joint border visit to border check-points, unofficial paths across the border, bus stations, as well as markets and villages on both sides of the border, This provided officials from both countries a unique opportunity to see for themselves to assess and understand the trafficking situation, in order to improve future joint planning to combat trafficking in the border areas.
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