China, Russia dismiss US report on human trafficking

China and Russia have rejected a report by the US State Department that accuses them of failing to make greater efforts to fight human trafficking.

China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a Thursday regular briefing in Beijing, “We believe that the US side should take an objective and impartial view of China’s efforts [in fighting human trafficking] and stop making unilateral or arbitrary judgments of China.”

She added that Beijing has always attached great importance to “fighting all crimes of trafficking.”

Russian Foreign Ministry’s human rights envoy Konstantin Dolgov also said in a statement, “Unfortunately, instead of a deep and objective review of why human trafficking is growing, including on the territory of the United States, the [US] report’s authors are once again using unacceptable methodology under which governments are ranked based on the political sympathies or antipathies of the US State Department.”

On Wednesday, the State Department downgraded Moscow and Beijing to the bottom of a table on countries fighting human trafficking.

The report claimed that Beijing had failed to “demonstrate significant efforts to comprehensively prohibit and punish all forms of trafficking” and “forced labor remains a problem, including in brick kilns, coal mines and factories.”

The report also claimed that a million people in Russia “are exposed to ‘exploitative’ labor conditions characteristic of trafficking cases, such as withholding of documents, nonpayment for services, physical abuse, or extremely poor living conditions.”