No one knows exactly how many of these men have ended up languishing in Malaysian detention facilities, but the estimates of returned victims range from 40 to more than 100 in Lenggeng alone.

After authorities eventually apprehended the defiant Phal Chantha and his friend Rim Rann, they were sent through a series of detention facilities until ending up in the notorious Lenggeng detention centre.

“I was sent to live in the small prison cell, 16 metres by 4 metres, with more than 40 people. We slept on each other and shat in the same room,” he said.

From a block of several hundred male detainees from countries around the world, Phal Chantha could hear the cries of about 10 Cambodian women who said they had fled abusive working conditions as house keepers without their passports and had been subsequently detained as illegal migrant workers.

“I felt pity on them very much, but I didn’t know what to do.”

It was also in Lenggeng that Phal Chantha forged a relationship with two other men, Vann Vinn and Sim Ek, and began trying to devise a plan to secure their return to Cambodia.

Hornung explains that, once inside, people like Phal Chantha, Rim Rann, Van Vinn and Sim Ek can be processed under Malaysia’s robust anti-human trafficking legislation, but are sometimes, inexplicably, deemed undocumented migrant workers and considered to have committed criminal offenses.

Sim Ek and Van Vinn were luckily identified as legitimate trafficking victims and eventually transported home through official channels, but Phal Chantha and Rim Rann were subjected to different standards of law.

They were deemed to be undocumented migrant workers, received prison terms of 3 months and on top of routine beatings from the Lenggeng’s guards, were subjected to caning, a punishment under Malaysian law.

“Under Malaysian law, 100 percent of the cases we have dealt with in the past four or five years, all of them have been trafficking victims under the Malaysian anti-trafficking bill,” said Hornung.

Both Hornung and Fernandez agree the legislation alone is an adequate framework to protect trafficking victims such as Phal Chantha and Sim Ek. The problem is not the law but the way it is enforced.

Sim Ek says that other than one brief meeting with Cambodian embassy officials who promised to help him and then went silent, his only contact with the outside world during his incarceration was with brokers who promised to help him – for a price.

“You have 13 of these immigration detention depots in Malaysia.

We have reports about the biggest ones and these seem to be a thriving business,” said Hornung.

Phal Chantha also tried to contact the Cambodian embassy and managed to get onto an embassy official who told him to call back in a few days time.

“I called again and he said that he was a vegetable seller.”

Oung Vantha, an official at the Cambodian embassy in Malaysia, says the embassy does consult with Cambodians stuck in Malaysian detention centres, but is hamstrung by the need to negotiate with Malaysian authorities and the lack of funds to fly victims back home.

“The victims contact the relatives by themselves, so they have money to buy a ticket,” he said.

After that, Oung Vantha says, negotiations can begin with Malaysian immigration officials to secure their release.

“Immigration in Malaysia will prepare the document for the victim and ask the Cambodian embassy to issue the travel document for the victim, and the embassy will issue the Lesser Passe for them,” he said.

Koy Kuong, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, also stands by the support provided to trafficking victims from Cambodian embassy officials in Malaysia.

“If they call the embassy [in Malaysia], the embassy will take actions to help them immediately, but we are afraid that they do not contact us,” he said.

“I would like them to go to abroad legally, so if something happens to them, we can easily help them.”

But Fernandez gives a very different rendition of the repatriation process.

“If it’s human trafficking victims, then the government sends them back, but if it is undocumented migrant workers, what happens is one way of getting them out is to ask the families to pay.

The immigration officials do this; they get agents who demand or threaten money to get home,” she said.

Although her organisation is not allowed into detention facilities, Fernandez says brokering agents have virtually unfettered access.

“This is a form of corruption because, on one hand, you do not allow NGOs to go in, but you do allow agents. How can you allow them when you say no one is allowed into a detention centre?”

The deputy chief of mission of the Malaysian embassy in Phnom Penh, Raja Saifful Ridzuwan, said he was unaware of re-trafficking in Malaysian detention facilities.

Explicit or implicit, there is evidence, including copies of brokering agreements signed by Cambodian government officials, brokers and families, that immigration officials in Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia are willing players in the business of bondage.

One of the latest returnees, Hornung says, described how a female Cambodian broker named Rum Many (phonetic spelling) was allowed to take all the inmates at Lenggeng into a room, where she made it clear there was only one way home anytime soon – pay her money.

“She was telling them that this would be 1.5 million riel per person so that it would be best for them to cooperate with her and give them the contact details of family members in Cambodia so they can arrange to be returned to Cambodia.”

The Post has obtained a copy of one of the contracts used in 2008 to sanction such a brokering agreement, for the sum of 1.4 million riel.

Signed by a victim whose name must be concealed to protect his safety, a woman named Mat Samny acting on behalf of her husband, Loh Samad, and the chief of Panyier Khraet district’s Por Pel commune in Kampong Cham, Sat Mod, the document is a clear example of local government complicity in re-trafficking.

Because low-level government and police corruption is a daily reality in all three countries through which Cambodian male migrant workers are trafficked, Hornung maintains the only way to ensure victims are correctly identified and processed accordingly is through high-level multilateral government cooperation.

“While that is still not happening, there will be continuing extortion and if you look at the wider problem, if the families have to pay for the return, which is in the range of $300 to $400 per head, this will most definitely, invariably lead to further indebtedness of the families,” he said.

The cycle of trafficking, then, comes full circle, Hornung says. The family is forced to mortgage their house and in order to keep up with loan repayments they often have no choice but to send more of their children into clandestine labour markets.

It’s even worse for the victims. After all they have endured, the burden of responsibility for their family’s financial ruin weighs heavily on their shoulders.

“Just imagine if you have been on the high seas for years, you come back with no money in your pocket but $400 in debt, so you become responsible for the misery of the entire family,” Hornung said.

“We had one case of three of them just crouching outside the office, watching the traffic, unable to think, unable to talk. So you have cases in which people are really, really troubled.”

For Phal Chantha, who finally boarded a registered flight bound for Cambodia on May 22, 2010, his release was bittersweet; though his months of bondage had come to an end, his freedom had come at the expense of his family’s financial freedom.

He returned to Olympic market, working the same menial job for the same meager salary and escaped lifelong indebtedness and family resentment only because of the intervention of Licadho.

A few weeks after Sim Ek was reunited with his family, he was working for $2.50 a day scavenging for firewood in a forest not far from his home in Banteay Meachey.

But instead of coming home with money to support his family, he stepped on a landmine.

“I am the only one responsible for my family. What will happen to my family now,” he said, having lost most of his right leg and sustained serious injuries to both hands.

Extortion has taken everything from Sim Ek and he sees only one way out of the vicious cycle.

“I do not want live, not in this world.”