Crossing the Moral Boundary

By Mario Vargas Llosa
Originally published in The New York Times, January 7, 2001
Sunday Section 4; Page 17; Editorial Desk

DATELINE: LONDON

A model employee of the French public transport authority, according to his chiefs and workmates, the Parisian bachelor Amnon Chemouil, who is now 48, discovered one of Thailand's tourist attractions in 1992. Not its tropical landscape or its ancient civilization and Buddhist temples, but cheap and easy sex, one of the country's flourishing industries. At the resort of Pattaya, near Bangkok, he could have sex with very young prostitutes. He vacationed there again in 1993 and 1994.

On his third trip, he met in a bar at Pattaya another sex tourist, Viktor Michel, a Swiss citizen, who encouraged him to seek out even younger girls. Mr. Michel took care of everything: found the procuress and a hotel room. The woman appeared there with a niece who was 11 years of age, and Mr. Chemouil paid $20. All the doings in the hotel room at Pattaya were recorded on video by Viktor Michel, and upon returning to Paris and his job in the public transport system, Mr. Chemouil received a copy of this cassette from his friend and added it to his collection of pornographic videos.

Some time later Viktor Michel found himself in trouble with the Swiss police, much less tolerant than the Thai ones. Searching his home for illegal pornography as part of an investigation into a pedophile ring, they found the video from Pattaya. Under interrogation, the video hobbyist revealed the circumstances in which the video had been filmed and Mr. Chemouil's identity. A report was sent to the French police, who put it in the hands of a judge.

Here I must open a parenthesis in my story, to declare my admiration for French justice. Many things function poorly in France and deserve criticism, but justice functions very well. French courts and judges act with an independence and courage that are an example for all other democracies. They have brought to light countless cases of corruption at higher economic, administrative and political levels, and have sent to trial—and in some cases, to prison—people who by their wealth and influence would in other societies be untouchable. In matters of human rights, racial discrimination, and subversion and terrorism, justice in France is usually characterized by efficacy and prompt intervention.

This was not, we may assume, the impression felt by the surprised Amnon Chemouil when he was arrested and taken before a court in Paris to pay for having violated the penal code of 1994 by sexually violating a minor. The French penal law is applicable to all offenses committed by a French citizen "within or without" French territory, and a 1998 law authorizes the courts to try "sexual aggressions committed abroad" even when the deeds are not considered crimes in the country where they were committed.

The trial of Amnon Chemouil, which took place this fall, set a precedent. It was the first time an offense of "sex tourism" had come before a court in one of the wealthy countries where this sort of tourism typically originates. Several organizations that oppose sexual exploitation of children appeared as plaintiffs, among them the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef), End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism and a group in Thailand that was able to locate in Bangkok, seven years later, the aunt and girl of the story. The girl, now 18, went to Paris and testified, in private, to the judges, who also viewed a copy of Viktor Michel's video that was found in the search of Amnon Chemouil's house.

The accused, who said that in the eight months he had spent in prison awaiting trial he had experienced a mental cataclysm, admitted he had performed the acts in the video, begged the victim's pardon and asked the court to punish him. The sentence was seven years' imprisonment, instead of the 10 called for by the prosecutor.

Many conclusions may be drawn from this story. The first is that if France's example were followed by countries like Spain, Germany, Britain, Italy and the United States, which, with their high incomes, are among the principal practitioners of "sex tourism," then it is possible that the thousands of offenses of this type committed daily in the poorer countries—especially concerning the sexual exploitation of children—might at least diminish and that some of the perpetrators might be punished.

The precedent established by France is impeccable: a modern democracy cannot allow its citizens to be exonerated of legal responsibility if they sin cheerfully outside of national borders just because a foreign country has no juridical norms that prohibit the activity or because those norms are not enforced.

Hunger, the need for money, and extensive corruption and inefficiency in many poor countries have caused child prostitution to prosper spectacularly, with the indifference or open complicity of the authorities. As Unicef and its allies testified at the trial of Mr. Chemouil, the dimensions of the problem are multiple and growing. We need not entertain very high hopes of its eradication, of course, because the poverty and misery that lie behind it constitute an almost insurmountable obstacle.

But the trial in Paris shows a positive side to the new bete noire of the incorrigible enemies of modernity: globalization. If frontiers had not been fading away and, in many fields, disappearing, Amnon Chemouil would never have appeared before the court that tried and sentenced him, and would surely have spent many more vacations in Pattaya. The rigid, straitjacket conception of national sovereignty is being transformed, leading to attempts at wider justice like the detention of Augusto Pinochet in England for his crimes against humanity in Chile, and now this trial.

Globalization is not only the creation of world markets and transnational companies; it also means the extension of justice and democratic values into regions where barbarism still flourishes.

Mario Vargas Llosa is the Peruvian novelist.
This article, which also appeared in El Pais, Madrid, was translated by James Brander.

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