MOSCOW, October 8 (RIA Novosti) - The United States and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are set to cooperate in the battle against human trafficking through new strategies that they will establish for this purpose, Myanmar International reported.
"… So this is on ASEAN contexts, for US this will be the first step ever and we are hoping to see closer and closer activities with the United State of Human trafficking in the future," Khine Myat Chit, senior officer in the Security Cooperation Division at the ASEAN Secretariat, was quoted by Myanmar International as saying Tuesday.
The agreement was reached in Myanmar during an ASEAN-US seminar on human trafficking. The meeting described the issue as worrying to the entire world.
Luis CdeBaca, US ambassador-at-large, who was appointed in 2009 to coordinate the United States' activities in the battle against "contemporary forms of slavery," was quoted by Myanmar International as saying that the United States would work with ASEAN to sharpen responses to the problem.
CdeBaca also stated that Myanmar has improved its record in tackling human trafficking, though he noted that a lot of work still needed to be done.
According to the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP), Myanmar, located in Southeast Asia, functions as a source country from which women, children as well as men are trafficked and later subjected to forced labor and sexual exploitation in Thailand, China, Malaysia, South Korea and Macau.
