Cyber Scams and Human Rights Abuses in Southeast Asia: State & NGO Responses

• In Event: Poster Session: New Avenues in Human Rights Research & South Asian Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: New Avenues in Human Rights Research

Abstract

While cyber scams have flourished since the origins of the internet, there has been a dramatic and worrisome recent escalation in Southeast Asia. Due to Covid diminishing the customer base for its casinos, Chinese criminal syndicates aggressively started "recruiting" labor throughout Southeast Asia to work in these deserted locales. With false promises and sophisticated online solicitation efforts, the gangs recruited young, middle-class, tech-savvy workers from across Southeast Asia to engage in cryptocurrency fraud, "love scams," money laundering and illegal gambling. The scam centers are primarily located in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, but also in Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Estimates of those trafficked range from 25,000 to upwards of 100,000.

In addition to the phony solicitations, trafficking, and illegal enterprise, the criminal syndicates keep workers locked in these compounds in virtual servitude, brutally punishing those who resist or attempt to escape and threatening to send them to even worse conditions.

Despite increased public awareness and think tank documentation of the extent and seriousness of these crimes, there has been little coordinated international action. In part, this is because of the historical reluctance of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to become involved in issues that impinge on the sovereignty of its members. Another reason is that China, which is highly influential in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, has ambiguous attitudes towards this criminal activity, particularly in the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) that it has established. The SEZs were set up as less regulated territories that would serve as incentives for economic development, but all too often these spaces devolved into politically lawless zones outside the sovereign control of national political authorities.

The paper will examine the complexities of these economic and political arrangements from the standpoint of Aihwa Ong’s work on “graduated sovereignty’ (Ong, Aihwa. 2000. Graduated Sovereignty in Southeast Asia. Theory, Culture, and Society 17, 4: 55–75). It will focus on Special Economic Zones (SEZs), which embody diminished human rights within spatially delimited areas, and limited access for external authorities.

I will analyze three cases: Sihanoukville in Cambodia, the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Laos, and Shwe Kokko Yatai in Myanmar. Looking at a range of cases will enable us to see the challenges that emerge based on local circumstances and the applicability of international responses.

The paper will look at three types of responses: human rights with a focus on trafficking, regulation of the special economic zones, and great power politics as regards criminality in Southeast Asia.

From the standpoint of human rights, the focus has been on both persuading the states whose citizens have been trafficked to employ their embassies to demand the return their nationals and to treat those who had been trafficked as victims, despite the criminal activities that they had been coerced to engage in.

The discourse and legislation over trafficking have traditionally been dominated by a security and policing frame. Increasing the recognition of the rights of the trafficked, both in law and practice, has been a deliberate and incremental process led by actors such as the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime.

The second human rights strategy that has emerged is an incorporation of the classic Keck and Sikkink boomerang strategy by which countries in the global North, such as the U.K., U.S., and Canada, use domestic legislation to sanction illicit practices and persuade local actors to comply.

There is also a line of economic advocacy that focuses on the regulation of the SEZs. This could be seen both in national efforts to reform the SEZs, as well as international pressure by business interests to clean up their policies and image. This regulatory effort depends on China, which has established many of these zones and whose nationals often shape their policies.

Finally, there is the issue of direct state-to-state negotiation, which in both the Mekong Delta and in Myanmar would involve carving out a cooperative arrangement between the U.S. and China. As the International Crisis Group has argued, there are grounds for collaboration dealing with criminality despite competitive relationships within the region.
The response to cyber scams will continue and accelerate. The choices of how to advocate—the balance between human rights concerns that focus on trafficking and the broader economic and political efforts at regulation and negotiation—will have a profound effect on how successful the policies will be. The success of these campaigns will be a telling indicator of the types of sovereignty arrangements that will shape the development of these autonomous zones that have as of late eluded national and international control

Author

• Ted Perlmutter, Columbia University