Today (June 26), Amnesty International released a scathing report titled “Cambodia: ‘I am someone else’s property’: Slavery, human trafficking and torture in Cambodia’s fraud rings”, which mainly pointed out that Cambodia has failed miserably in combating human trafficking and call center rings.
Since 2022, Amnesty International has been documenting the shocking human rights crisis in Cambodia’s fraud industry, and found at least 53 frauds in which human rights violations, including human trafficking, torture, abuse, forced labor, child labor, deprivation of liberty and slavery, occurred or continued to occur.
The report also exposed a pattern of state failure that led to serious human rights violations, pointing out that the government’s response was extremely ineffective and failed to fulfill its obligations to prevent and properly investigate the fraud crisis, indicating that the government accepted the ongoing human rights violations and may even be involved in them.
The report published a map of cities where Cambodia’s fraud industry (telecom fraud, call center rings) is located, emphasizing that phenomena such as human trafficking, forced labor, child labor, torture and other abuses, deprivation of liberty and slavery are occurring on a large scale.
The report’s main conclusion is: “Importantly, the report finds that the Cambodian government has seriously failed to take adequate measures to end these widespread human rights violations, even though the main perpetrators of these violations are organized crime, and despite having been repeatedly informed of the existence of such violations in many cases. The country’s failure to uphold its international legal obligations and responsibilities puts it at risk of becoming complicit in these human rights violations.”
