THIRTEEN pregnant Philippine women accused of illegally acting as surrogate mothers in Cambodia after being recruited online may face prison terms after they give birth, a senior Interior Ministry official said.
Interior Ministry Secretary of State Chou Bun Eng, who leads the country’s fight against human trafficking and sexual exploitation, said police found 24 foreign women, 20 Philippine and four Vietnamese, when they raided a villa in Kandal province, near Phnom Penh, on Sept 23.
Thirteen of the Philippine women were found to be pregnant and were charged in court on Oct 1 under a provision in the law on Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation, she said.
The law was updated in 2016 to ban commercial surrogacy after Cambodia became a popular destination for foreigners seeking women to give birth to their children.
The surrogacy business boomed in Cambodia after it was put under tight restrictions in neighbouring Thailand, as well as in India and Nepal.
In July 2017, a Cambodian court sentenced an Australian woman and two Cambodian associates to one and a half years in prison for providing commercial surrogacy services.
The new case is unusual because surrogates normally are employed in their own countries, not transported elsewhere.
Cambodia already has a bad reputation for human trafficking, especially in connection with online scams in which foreigners recruited for work under false pretenses are kept in conditions of virtual slavery and help perpetrate criminal fraud online against targets in many countries.
Chou said the business that recruited the surrogates was based in Thailand, and their food and accommodation in Cambodia were arranged from there. She said the authorities had not yet identified the business.
She said the seven Philippine women and four Vietnamese women who were caught in the raid but who were not pregnant would be deported soon.
The 13 pregnant women have been placed under care at a hospital in Phnom Penh, said Chou. She added that after they give birth, they could be prosecuted on charges that could land them in prison for two to five years.
She said that Cambodia considered the women not to have been victimised but rather offenders who conspired with the organisers to sell the babies for money.
The Philippine Embassy in Cambodia, in response to a local press account of the affair, issued a statement on Wednesday confirming most of the details related to what it called the “rescue of 20 Filipino women”. — AP
