Canadian man jailed on child sex charges in Cambodia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Vigai Indra Komar has been jailed in Cambodia. (Photo: Phnom Penh Post)

A Canadian man appeared in a court Monday facing child prostitution charges in Cambodia and was remanded into custody to a provincial jail, the Star has confirmed.

Vigai Indra Komar, who had his Canadian passport issued in Vancouver, could spend up to six months in jail awaiting a trial, Seila Samleang, country director of a child protection advocacy group known as Action Pour Les Enfants told the Star in a phone interview.

Seila said his group had a lawyer representing the victim in the provincial court of the northwest province of Siem Riap.

He said the passport information indicated Komar, who listed his place of birth as the Indonesian island of Savu, would be 70 years old in July.

Police raided Komar’s hotel room on Friday and allegedly found him with a 14-year-old girl "cowering naked in the bathroom," according to a  report in the Phnom Penh Post.

Seila said on Monday he contacted Canadian police with whom he has worked in the past with on child sex tourism cases.

“After the charges (were) confirmed, we brought the case to the Canadian RCMP for their information and we hope that they will be working on it carefully,” Seila said.

Seila, whose group works closely with police to help victims of sex tourism, said he has dealt with “several cases from Canada” and that while some progress has been made in fighting the crime, “it is very prevalent here.”

“We don’t have a strong criminal justice system here, so children are still adrift,” he said.

In a recent series on child sex tourism, the Star reported that since 1998, more than 200 Canadians have been convicted abroad of sexual crimes against children and asked for help from their government, according to figures released by Public Safety Canada.

But here at home, under a 1997 law which makes it possible to prosecute Canadians for crimes committed outside our borders, there have been only five known convictions for child sex tourism.

The Phnom Penh newspaper said Komar was arrested by police at the Hilton Angkor resort in Siem Reap, a popular tourist destination near the famous Angkor temple ruins.

“This wealthy, elderly retiree left Canada to come to Cambodia to buy child prostitutes,” provincial chief prosecutor Ti Sovanthal told another national newspaper, the Cambodia Daily. “Now he is jail.”

Chea Heng, deputy chief of the anti-human trafficking and children protection office for Siem Reap province, said the police found the girl in the bathroom, "along with what they described as pornographic materials and erectile enhancement pills." 

None of the charges or the circumstances of the case have been tested in court.

The latest Trafficking in Persons Report for 2012 by the U.S. State Department says that the government of Cambodia “does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking” but is making “significant efforts” to do so.

It says there were convictions of 62 sex trafficking offenders during the year -- an increase from 20 offenders convicted during the previous reporting period.

In an interview with the Star, Phnom Penh Post editor in chief Alan Parkhouse said his reporters frequently report on cases of Western tourists arrested on child sex charges while local police and NGOs continue to work hard to combat the crime.

"They are definitely trying, but they are under-funded and under-resourced," Parkhouse said.

 

Julian Sher is a foreign affairs and investigative journalist with the Star and can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @juliansher

 

Mam Sonando: Cambodia to free jailed journalist who covered land grabs

Local radio station owner Mam Sonando, centre, is escorted by court security personnel as he enters an appeals court in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Thursday. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

When the Cambodian government ordered 1,000 village families to leave their homes last spring after awarding their land to a company planning to build a rubber plantation, journalist Mam Sonando reported the news on Beehive Radio, his independent station.

The government’s reaction was swift. The 71-year-old was charged with secession and last October was convicted of leading a secession plot against the government
and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Five months later, lobbying by the U.S. state department and human rights activists such as Amnesty International seems to have worked. Cambodia’s court of appeals today said it had dropped the secession charges against Sonando.

Instead, he’s been charged with illegal logging and given a suspended sentence after serving eight months in prison.

“Today's decision will give hope to other land and forest defenders who are being held by the Cambodian authorities," Oliver Courtney of international campaigns group Global Witness told the Guardian newspaper. "But we should remember that the Cambodian government has been pressured from every side to release Sonando, and in less high-profile cases they're still doing whatever it takes to silence their critics. As the country's land grabbing crisis gets worse, more and more people are getting arrested for speaking out – that has to stop."

Land grabs may be among the most concerning trends of the 21^st century. Throughout Africa, private companies are taking control of arable land and straining already scarce water resources.

The same thing is happening in Cambodia, Global Witness says. The watchdog group says nearly 75 per cent of Cambodia’s arable land has been converted to economic zones and awarded to private companies, typically without consultation or compensation to local communities.

More than 400,000 Cambodians have been forced off their land since 2003, the agency says.

At the same time, life has become increasingly difficult for journalists in Cambodia, where the group Reporters Without Borders says authoritarianism and censorship are on the increase. In its 2013 press freedom index, Cambodia placed 143rd among 179 countries surveyed. In 2012, Cambodia was 117th.

In September, another journalist, 44-year-old newspaper reporter Hang Serei, was found dead in the trunk of his car at a cashew plantation. He had been reporting on illegal logging. Earlier in 2012, the conservationist Chut Wutty was shot and killed by a soldier at an illegal logging site.

It’s unclear how soon Sonando might resume his coverage of the dispute in Broma, a village in Cambodia’s northern Kratie province where the agricultural company Casotim has been given land. Last May, hundreds of police officers raided the village and a 14-year-old girl was shot and killed.

Rick Westhead is a foreign affairs writer at the Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead