China among world's worst in human trafficking, may lead to US sanctions

An annual US State Department report on Wednesday cited China and Russia among the world’s worst offenders in fighting forced labour and sex trafficking, which could lead to US sanctions.

The US designation drops China and Russia, which already often are at odds with Washington, in the same category as North Korea and Iran.

The State Department ranks countries according to the efforts they make to fight human trafficking and China, Russia and Uzbekistan all fell to the lowest level, Tier 3, in the new report.

“Despite these modest signs of interest in anti-trafficking reforms, the Chinese government did not demonstrate significant efforts to comprehensively prohibit and punish all forms of trafficking and to prosecute traffickers,” US officials wrote.

The report said China’s one-child policy and preference for sons has led to fewer women in the country, thus increasing demand for women as brides or prostitutes.

In Russia, the government “had not established any concrete system for the identification or care of trafficking victims, lacking any formal victim identification and referral mechanism”, although there were some “ad hoc efforts”, the report said.

The citation is likely to further strain the complicated relations between the United States and the two countries, which already have been strained by the handling of the civil war in Syria and cybersecurity, among other issues.