This article was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission.
Two Chinese nationals and a Lao woman arrested earlier this year on human trafficking charges in northern Laos are being held in detention and will stand trial, Lao anti-trafficking police said Tuesday.
The three have been in detention since their arrest. Luang Namtha provincial police did not specify the dates of their arrests or trial.
Police rescued eight girls and boys from the traffickers, two of whom were under 18 years old. One of two underage girls was Vietnamese, but the rest were Laotian.
The trio photographed and recorded videos of the youths and published them online, said a member of the anti-human trafficking unit.
“One of the victims said that they had been confined in a house and forced to perform sexual acts,” he told Radio Free Asia. “Luckily, one of them was able to sneak out of the house one day and reported it to the police.”
Human trafficking is rife in Laos and other Southeast Asia countries where people who live in poverty and are desperate for work are easy targets for traffickers. They are promised well-paid jobs, then forced into servitude or sold to others as slaves. Many are subjected to physical and sexual abuse.
In the Luang Namtha case, the traffickers told the youths they could make up to 10 million kip, or US$450, a month working in restaurants, but later forced them to perform sex acts with each other live online and paid them 200,000 kip, or US$9, per act, said the first anti-human trafficking police officer.
The youths became victims of human trafficking “because they were poor, tempted by money, and because of the dire economic condition in our country,” said a second officer from the anti-trafficking unit.
Traffickers use the province, which borders China and Myanmar, as a transit route to take trafficked Laotians to neighboring countries, police said.
The Lao government has not fully met minimum standards for eliminating trafficking, but is making significant efforts to do so, according to the 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report issued by the U.S. State Department.
Those efforts include increasing the number of investigations into trafficking cases, convicting more traffickers, identifying more victims, providing services to victims, and removing potential trafficking victims from special economic zones, the report said.
Luang Namtha police have run public awareness campaigns for years to try to prevent the trafficking of Laotians to China and Myanmar, a third officer said.
“In our province, some bad people are trying to persuade our youths to visit or to work in other provinces or neighboring countries, and we are trying to stop these attempts,” she said.
In the past six months, police officers have spoken to more than 1,100 students, including 865 girls, about the danger of human trafficking, according to Luang Namtha police.
In 2023, authorities in Luang Namtha province rescued 16 victims of human trafficking, most of whom were minors from ethnic minority groups from other Lao provinces, including Oudomxay, Luang Prabang and Savannakhet.
Many of them were taken to Luang Namtha province by Chinese traffickers, while others were coerced into marrying Chinese men, taken to China, and later sold to other men or to entertainment venues in Myanmar.
