“More and more Vietnamese women and children are being sold into slavery by human traffickers,” said Mr Trong at a national conference on women and children trafficking prevention in Hanoi on April 6. 

“It's a shame to see women and children traded and sold as a kind of commodity when nothing is more important than human life,” stressed Mr Trong.

He asked the ministry to draw up a plan of action with the aim of curbing the crime by 2010.

Nearly 6,000 Vietnamese women and children have been sold as cheap labour or prostitutes in foreign countries, and another 8,000 are suspected to have been smuggled out of the country illegally by traffickers, according to a report delivered by Deputy Minister of Public Security Le The Tiem. 

Mr Tiem said the number of victims and caught human smugglers increased by 140 percent and 72 percent in 2006 compared to 2005. Many of the 136,000 marriages between foreigners and Vietnamese women are believed to be connected to human smuggling rings and mail-order bride schemes.

During the past two years, Vietnam has investigated nearly 600 human trafficking cases involving more than 1,500 women and child victims. An estimated 1,300 of those were safely returned to their homes. Some 122 were solved through diplomatic means.

“Traffickers transported their victims out of the country via roads and highways. Some of the youth even ended up as adoptive children for childless families,” said Mr Tiem.

Most of the smuggling rings were run by transnational criminals that make huge profits from their crime. They target unemployed women and poor children from rural areas by promising to find them work or rich husbands. 

Participants discussed solutions to human trafficking including raising public awareness via mass media, training local counsellors, encouraging people to protect themselves and expose smugglers, drafting new laws to prevent human trafficking and asking the National Assembly to ratify international conventions and protocols related to the issue. They stressed the need to improve information exchanges between domestic authorities, strengthen international cooperation in fighting this crime and intensify investigations to bring criminals to justice.