Norway will be able to jail clients of prostitutes for up to six months under proposed legislation aimed at stamping out the human trade, officials said on Wednesday.

“Norway will not be a free zone for pimps and traffickers of human beings,” Justice Minister Knut Storberget said in a statement following circulation of a draft bill.

“We want to stop prostitution in Norway,” he said.

Prison sentences would be longer than six months if trafficking was involved, officials said of the draft bill that was sent to officials and other interested parties for discussion before a final proposal to parliament by mid-2008.

Norway is following the example of Scandinavian neighbour Sweden that introduced a similar ban in 1999. Its law also provides for up to six months in prison.

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The service for combating human trafficking in the French town of Reims and Bulgarian border police busted an organised criminal group involved in trafficking in women.

French investigators detained four men aged 30 to 37 from the Bulgarian town of Dobrich. They organised trafficking in women to Western Europe. The men involved in the scheme 20 women from northeastern Bulgaria, who were taken abroad and forced them into prostitution.

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The group is active since May 2006. Bulgarian border police joined the investigation in the beginning of 2007.

Group leaders and their assistants have acted on the territory of northeastern France.

Police officers also detained a prostitute who controlled the rest of the girls.

Another criminal group for women trafficking used for sexual services was busted in March 2007 with the co-operation of French police in Bulgaria.

The recent discovery of hundreds of slave laborers working in feudal conditions in brick kilns prompted a national outcry in China — and an unusually forceful reaction from the central government. The Communist Party immediately dispatched tens of thousands of police to break up the ring, arrested hundreds, and inspired strongly worded editorials in such state organs as the People’s Daily denouncing local officials’ lapses. President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao also weighed in, giving highly publicized orders to launch a “nationwide campaign” to eradicate slave labor.

But this campaign mostly misses the point. Chinese officials and editorial writers may rail about local corruption and the evils of forced labor, but the root of the problem is something they are unlikely to do anything about: a woefully inadequate legal system that lacks true independence from the government, cannot address citizen concerns and exacerbates rather than alleviates local corruption.

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Human Right Watch; by Nicholas Bequelin