UK Police Fail to Stop Vietnamese Slave Labor in Cannabis Farms

By teleSUR

27 March 17

 

Cannabis cultivated with Vietnamese slave labor accounts for a significant proportion of the illegal crop grown in the UK, the Guardian reported.

he United Kingdom is failing to deal with the issue of the trafficking of enslaved Vietnamese teenagers to come and work in illegal cannabis farms, the country’s independent anti-slavery commissioner said Sunday.

Kevin Hyland told the Guardian that the intelligence-gathering system designed to tackle the trafficking of enslaved workers and other forms of modern slavery in the country was “a mess” and added that there was a lack of commitment from police when they raid cannabis farms.

The farms are discovered every week, he told the British newspaper, but when they are identified they are “not being properly investigated.” Police forces had “not pushed forward with the urgency I would expect.”

He also criticized the government for failing to bring any conviction against people traffickers from Vietnam despite the country being one of the biggest sources of the U.K’s slave labor.

Hyland further urged more campaigns to spread awareness regarding the conditions in which cannabis in the U.K. is produced to those who use it. “Most people who are using cannabis might know that it is funding some sort of criminality, but do they know the suffering at the end of that?

People need to think very carefully that while it may be seen as a recreational drug, behind it could be wholesale abuse of young people and children who have got no freedom and no choice.”

Cannabis cultivated with Vietnamese slave labor accounts for a significant proportion of the illegal crop grown in the UK, the Guardian reported.

“Reports suggest a new trend of cultivation sites being controlled by white British organized crime groups, which employ Vietnamese nationals who are forced to work in cultivation,” the latest National Police Chiefs’ Council report into cannabis noted.

Vietnamese slave labor is shipped into the U.K. from France where authorities have failed to deal with a camp traffickers set up for holding children and adults from the Asian country, Mimi Vu, who visited the camp in December from the Vietnamese anti-trafficking organization Pacific Links said.

“The site is very under the radar. They were huddled around oil drums, with fires to keep warm. There were some younger ones, about 15 years, who I felt very worried about,” she told the British outlet.