Thailand passes marital rape bill
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/6225872.stm
Published: 2007/06/21 10:32:43 GMT
© BBC MMVII

The Thai national assembly has passed into law the nation's first marital rape bill.

Offenders now face up to 20 years in jail and a fine of 40,000 baht ($1,156; £620) for raping their spouses - the same penalty that exists for non-marital rape.

The bill also allows for women and homosexuals to be prosecuted for rape.

The previous law had defined a rapist as a person who rapes a woman who is not his wife.

"The previous law was discriminatory," said Kingkaew Inwang, deputy director of the Office of Women's Affairs and Family Development.

"Now, everybody is being treated equally under the new law," she told the Agence France Presse news agency. 

Uganda probe into 'orphan trade'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/africa/6228760.stm
Published: 2007/06/21 20:58:46 GMT
© BBC MMVII

Ugandan police have launched a probe into allegations that two orphanages are involved in child trafficking.

Police Inspector General Kale Kayihura made the disclosure at a media briefing during a conference to look at fighting human trafficking in East Africa.

Ugandan academic Moses Okello told the BBC that a spate of recent cases showed the scale child trafficking in Uganda "could get out of hand".

He blamed porous borders and lax immigration controls for the problem.

"There is a local joke here that it's quite difficult to pass drugs through the Ugandan immigration ports, but it's easy to pass humans," said Mr Okello, who runs the Refugee Law Project at Makerere University.

He told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme that Uganda had fairly progressive child-protection provisions, but lacked resources to implement them.

"I can totally understand why border controls can be very problematic for the immigration officials - given that quite a lot of them are not skilled enough to understand or even to detect how child-trafficking rings operate," he said.

"Besides, Uganda's naming system is so fluid that anybody could pass off as being the parents of a kid."

In the last couple of weeks, some Ugandan children had inexplicably ended up in Kenya without any parental protection, he said.

"We also know that from our legal aid clinic here [that] there are quite a bunch of people who have showed up in the last month claiming to have been trafficked or to know people who have been trafficked."

Correspondents say little is known human trafficking in East Africa and the conference in Uganda's capital, Kampala, hopes to come up with an action plan to address the lack of information and find ways to curb it. 

US finds neglected Iraqi orphans
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/6769077.stm
Published: 2007/06/19 18:02:12 GMT
© BBC MMVII

Two dozen boys have been found starved and neglected at a government-run orphanage for special needs children in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

The children were discovered last week by a US military advisory team that was out on patrol with Iraqi soldiers.

The emaciated boys, some near death, were left naked and covered in their own excrement on concrete floors, images broadcast by CBS News showed.

The US soldiers found fully stacked kitchen shelves and new clothes nearby.

The boys had been kept in the shocking conditions for more than a month despite the orphanage having been staffed, the troops said.

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