The United States State Department recently provided an encouraging assessment of Cambodia’s human trafficking record in order to clarify Congressional testimony given by one of its officials in October.

Joe Yun, deputy assistant secretary of state within the bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said before a House of Representatives Foreign Affairs sub-committee that Cambodia was a regional example of improved efforts to combat trafficking.

Congressman Ed Royce, a critic of the Cambodian government, sent a letter to Yun dated November 4 and obtained by the Post on Friday, regarding his testimony.

“I was perplexed to uncover discrepancies between it and the TIP [Trafficking in Persons] report,” Royce wrote. The annual TIP report monitors countries’ progress in combatting human trafficking.

The State Department’s reply on November 23 cites recent raids against labour recruitment firms and Prime Minister Hun Sen’s October sub-decree suspending migration to Malaysia for domestic work as evidence of “progress”, but says that laws must be better enforced to protect migrant workers.