The meeting, following the first edition held in Bangkok, Thailand in September last year, attracted the participation of representatives from Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, the UNODC, the Japan International Cooperation Agency, among others.
At a time when Southeast Asian countries have become some of the most popular destinations for tourists in the region and around the world, the countries also face the risk of increasing child sexual abuse cases in travel and tourism.
In that context, delegates at the meeting shared their research results and made recommendations to enhance law enforcement and methods to strengthen international co-operation in combating travelling child sexual exploitation crimes.
According to Christopher Batt, UNODC Officer-In-Charge in Vietnam, stressed that child sexual exploitation seriously violates children’s rights, warning that the problem has seen complicated developments.
The robust development of tourism in the Southeast Asian region has helped increased the number of tourist to the region, but it has also turned the region into a meeting venue for so-called traveling child sex offenders.
In the fight against such crimes, the Governments of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam have focused on reforming legal and judicial systems, he said, praising Vietnam’s efforts to amend its Penal Code, Criminal Procedure Code, and relevant laws in order to consolidate the legal foundation in combating child sexual exploitation crimes.
Speaking at the meeting, Nguyen Thi Kim Thoa, Head of the Department of Criminal and Administrative Legislation under the Ministry of Justice said that the meeting provided a valuable opportunity to boost co-operation between legal research groups from judicial and law enforcement agencies in the Mekong region in preventing and controlling sexual crimes and better protecting children at risk of sexual exploitation by sex offenders.
She called for further multinational cooperation among countries in order to fill the cracks in their legal systems, targeting to successfully prosecute child sex offenders in the future.
