VATICAN CITY (Zenit): The Vatican has called on the international community to intervene against prostitution and other exploitation of women, children, and illegal immigrants.
The appeal was made by Archbishop Dominique Rezeau, the Vatican’s permanent observer at the UN in Vienna, when he addressed the 10th UN Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Criminals in early April.
Archbishop Rezeau acknowledged that, in order to address the challenge of international organised crime it is necessary for individual countries and the international community to adopt effective measures at a technical and juridical level establishing preventive strategies and rigorous application of the law.
The archbishop insisted that it is necessary to go to the root of the problem and, at the same time, be committed to “implement policies of development that have a positive effect in the prevention of crime and in the struggle against organised criminality”.
The Vatican representative invited those present to analyse “some of the social, moral and human aspects of the struggle against organised crime on a world scale”, and he recalled that, according to studies, in 1998 some 4 million women were “victims in one way or another of the international traffic in human beings”.
