China, Russia and Uzbekistan were added to a US list of nations that are among the worst offenders in human trafficking, the State Department said Wednesday, dpa reported.
China was cited for not fully complying with minimum international standards to eliminate trafficking despite Beijing's recent unveiling of a plan to increase efforts to protect victims.
"Despite these modest signs of interest in anti-trafficking reforms, the Chinese government did not demonstrate significant efforts to comprehensively prohibit and punish all forms of trafficking and to prosecute traffickers," the State Department said in its annual Trafficking in Persons report.
China had been on a watch list for the past nine years, but could no longer be granted a waiver to keep it from the list of worst offenders that also includes countries such as North Korea and Zimbabwe.
The report pointed to a skewed sex ratio in China that it said was due to the country's one-child policy. Because families traditionally favour boys there is a market for trafficked brides and prostitutes, as well as trafficking within the country's internal migrant population and state-sponsored forced labour.
In Russia, the report pointed to labour trafficking as the primary problem, with up to 1 million people exposed to "'exploitative' labour conditions characteristic of trafficking cases."
Like China, Russia had been on a watch list for nine years and was downgraded because it had already received waivers a maximum of two times.
Prosecutions of trafficking were low compared to the trafficking problem in the country and the government had not set up a system to identity or take care of trafficking victims, the report said.
Uzbekistan was described as a source country for trafficking into forced labour and the sex trade.
It was also called out for "government-organized forced labour" during its annual cotton harvest, making it one of only a few countries that "subjects its citizens to forced labour through implementation of state policy."
Uzbekistan appeared on the watch list for the six previous years.
Three other countries, Azerbaijan, the Congo and Iraq, were removed from the watch list because they made progress in combating trafficking.