Is Cambodia the criminal haven it once was?

Alleged Japanese thief Kenji Nishizawa, arrested last week, is sitting in a holding cell across from Phnom Penh’s Ponchentong International Airport while Cambodian officials await formal extradition papers from his native Japan.

Swedish national Gottfrid Svartholm Warg got his walking papers eight days ago to return to Sweden to face a sentence handed down in absentia for his role in illegal file sharing, and convicted Swiss pedophile Hugo Leuthold will be booted out of the Kingdom at the end of the five-year prison sentence he received last Friday.

Despite the recent spate of high-profile arrests and deportations, analysts, attorneys and civil society groups are divided on whether the Kingdom is finally beginning to live down its reputation as a haven for the fugitives and criminals who have long been drawn to the country for its perceived culture of impunity.

According to Seila Samreang, country director of the child-protection NGO Action Pour les Enfants (APLE), deportations have become a powerful tool in fighting child sex abuse.

“We observed the same trend: that there are increasing numbers of deportations ordered by the courts,” he said, noting that the uptick began around 2010. “That is very much a positive development. 

Before that, it was hard to get the court to deport convicted pedophiles, and we had to do a lot of work to get the government to do so.”

In the 16 cases against accused foreign sex offenders in which the NGO was involved in prosecuting in 2011, it successfully lobbied for deportation eight times. Of the nine such cases so far this year, five have ended in deportation — something that never happened over the course of 27 cases in 2007 and 2008.

Although the figures represent only a portion of total instances of child abuse, Samreang maintains deportations make a powerful point.

“That is a strong message that the impunity is ending, and Cambodia is trying to do its best to stop this problem of people coming to Cambodia and hiding or committing offences against children,” Samreang added.

Dun Vibol, a defence attorney who has represented everyone from bank robbers to the very pedophiles prosecuted by APLE, agrees that culture seems to be changing, though perhaps not for altruistic reasons.

“I think that Cambodia right now is leader of the ASEAN countries, so they want to show the world that they are against criminality, against offenders, against the gangsters,” he said, noting that he has recently seen “a lot more [deportations] than in the past”.

But Vibol doesn’t think this will change when Cambodia gives up the ASEAN chair.

“They want a stable country,” Vibol said, pointing out that stability engenders investment. “Because Cambodia wants to focus on economic growth, that’s why they want to crack down on the criminality.”

Council of Ministers spokesman Phay Siphan acknowledged the increase in deportations and extraditions, but rejected the notion that it was tied to economic benefits, calling it instead “a duty we have to do”.

“It’s international co-operation,” he said, adding that weeding out foreign criminals had a positive impact on “everything – not investment, everything”.