Acting to save the children

The three-day conference concluded with an international action plan for police and law enforcement agencies to step up their collaboration through intelligence-sharing and the training of Asian police by their European counterparts. The plan is expected to be put in motion by the end of the year. Measures agreed at the meeting will be submitted for formal endorsement to the 15 EU nations and 10 Asian countries: Brunei, China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

The London conference brought together experts on the sex trade from governments, police and children's charities across Europe and Asia, as well as international agencies and travel agents. The latest UN figures suggest that up to one million children work as prostitutes in Asia.

There are fears that the Asian economic crisis will exacerbate the trend as increasing poverty and the breakdown of families prompt parents to sell their children into prostitution.

Besides focusing on child prostitution in Asia, the conference also highlighted the global nature of the child prostitution trade, which is a serious problem in the West and is most notably on the increase in Eastern Europe.

"It's not only Asia and Europe that we are concerned about but other countries such as South America, the United States and Eastern Europe," said Bertil Lindblad, a senior child protection adviser for UNICEF.

EU countries have said they will inform the authorities in Southeast Asia whenever known paedophiles are travelling there. The countries will also boost cooperation between police and other agencies and have vowed to crack down hard on people involved in the child-sex trade.

Britain, Australia, Belgium, France and Germany are among a number of Western countries that have adopted laws enabling them to prosecute citizens who travel overseas to abuse children.

The landmark Asia-Europe (ASEM) summit comes at a time when the Asian financial crisis threatens to worsen the problem of the child-sex trade in Asia. But despite the high-profile event, the End Child Prostitution, Pornography and Trafficking Campaign (ECPAT) remains critical of government efforts in this area.

ECPAT spokeswoman Christine Beddoe said that of the 122 countries that agreed on action plans to fight child-sex tourism at a meeting in Stockholm in 1996, only 14 had incorporated them into law. The 14 do not include the host of the latest conference, Britain.

"Every day we waste on debating finances, children are being abused and abandoned by society," Beddoe said. Children's charities say that in Asia alone, more than 650,000 children under the age of 16 work as prostitutes and that one million children enter the global sex market every year.