A group of Russian lawmakers called Wednesday for the adoption of a witness protection program for the first time in the post-Soviet era in a bid to stamp out a booming sex trade in Eastern Europe.
"We need to adopt a witness protection plan ... because victims' families are afraid to come out because they are being blackmailed" by gangs who are trafficking women, said Anatoly Kulikov, a former Russian interior minister who now serves in parliament.
Their call came after a visit to Washington this month that saw the lawmakers and other top officials hold talks in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the State Department and Congress.
Russia has only a fraction of the true figure of how many women - either Russian or those who pass through the country from Central Asia - end up held hostage as prostitutes in the West.
Irina Mizulina, who oversees a Russian parliamentary department studying sex trafficking, said official statistic showed that 48 percent of the women who were reported to have been sent abroad were minors.
But she said this only accounted for the reported cases, which represented a tiny fraction of the US and UN estimate.
"We were shown a US State Department report ... that 50,000 women may have been sent from Russia in 2002," Mizulina said.
"This is a very safe business for criminals because the witnesses are so scared to testify and the victim is frightened because she is being blackmailed ... sometimes told that her family or children were not safe."
A Russian interior ministry official quoted a United Nations report as saying that the sex trade industry was worth seven billion dollars to the traffickers and that 700,000 women were sent into virtual sexual slavery every year.
"But we do not know the true figure in Russia," said top interior ministry criminal investigator Boris Gavrilov. "That is why we are calling for this law."
The lawmakers said they could only rely on US and United Nations estimates of how many women passed through Russia into the West because Russian legislation that prohibits a witness protection program prevents them from keeping reliable statistics.
Russia has not had a witness protection program since it was repealed in the Soviet era in the early 1970s.
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