(China Daily)
Updated: 2007-12-14 07:51

For outsiders, the second Sub-regional Plan of Action (SPA II) the Coordinated Mekong Ministerial Initiative against Human Trafficking (COMMIT) produced in Beijing yesterday looks very much like its predecessor, except for minor changes in wording.

The ministers, representatives of the governments of the six countries in the Greater Mekong Sub-region, Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam, gathered here not to carve out a new trail, but to make sure the coordinated efforts against trafficking in people they kick-started with an October 2004 Memorandum of Understanding continue when the first SPA, adopted in March 2005, expires at year's end. The SPA II, in this sense, refreshes and reaffirms what the countries committed three years ago, and will serve as a collective roadmap for the next three years.

Concerted anti-trafficking endeavors under the first SPA have more or less contained the spread of cross-border human trafficking. But the heinous crime and its deep roots are still there doing harm. For a document like the SPA II, persistence, or a show of uninterrupted commitment, is of overriding importance. It satisfies all our expectations concerning the problems identified since the COMMIT emerged as a formal alliance to combat the dirty business.

The seemingly insignificant changes in wording, according to insiders, reflect the signatories' new understanding of anti-trafficking activities. The idea to integrate previously divided steps of identification, protection, recovery and reintegration of victims, for example, is said to be the result of agreement that none of them can be taken out from a natural process. Wording aside, we hope the new knowledge can result in higher degrees of consensus, and more sophisticated approaches to the thorny problem.

The COMMIT came into being because of the understanding that no single country can eradicate cross-border trade in humans on its own. Our own experiences at home, as well as those in the past years under the COMMIT framework demonstrate its resolution requires multi-sector collaboration. The SPA II retains the limelight on such matters as training and capacity building, legal framework and cooperation.

(China Daily 12/14/2007 page10)