South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Hong Kong are all leading destinations for organized sex tours, says the US Congressional Research Service (CRS).
Indonesia and Taiwan were categorized as secondary destinations in the report called“Trafficking in Persons: US Policy and Issues for Congress.”
"We’re making all-out efforts to present accurate information on Korea to politicians, government officials, academics and experts in the US,” a South Korean official in Washington told local Korean news agency ChoSun in response to the report. “It is sometimes possible that accurate information on the reality in Korea is not delivered. We’ll take a proper countermeasure after finding out the truth first."
The Korean government has closed down brothels, “organized prostitution for foreign tourists has to all intents and purposes eradicated, and ordinary prostitution has been outlawed and drastically reduced,” after prostitution crackdown laws went into effect on in 2004.
“The latest classification by the CRS is, therefore, a blow for the Korean government, highlighting the need to disseminate accurate information to improve the national image,” Cho Sun news said.
The CRS report stated that US President George W. Bush in 2007 issued sanctions against North Korea, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela, which the US State Department had categorized, in its own human trafficking report, as Tier 3 countries for failing to address the problem of trafficking for forced labor.
By David Wilkening
