Yangon: Myanmar will join other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in establishing a crime-related database system in 2006 to help fight crimes through exchange of such data, a local weekly reported Thursday.

The country’s database will be set up in accordance with the guidelines laid down by the 25th ASEAN Police Chiefs’ Conference held in Bali, Indonesia, late last month, the 7-Day News quoted the Myanmar Police Force as saying.

Myanmar and Laos are the only two countries yet to ink for the introduction of the system, it said.

That conference mainly covered 12 kinds of crimes including illicit trafficking of narcotic drugs, human trafficking, terrorism, arms smuggling, economic offenses, fake credit cards and travel documents.

According to the Myanmar anti-drug authorities, the country exposed a total of 3,012 narcotic-drug cases in 2004, punishing 4, 153 people in the connection. It netted a total of 939 human traffickers in 474 related cases between 2002 and 2004, preventing 2,629 people, including 1,225 young women, from being victimized.

Meanwhile, Myanmar has been drafting a law on suppression of trafficking in persons. The law, drafted in accordance with the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crimes, is to be enacted later this year.

In April 2004, Myanmar enacted the Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Law to serve as a legal basis for the country’s international cooperation in crime suppression including human trafficking.

Again in October that year, as part of the Coordinated Mekong Ministerial Initiative Against Trafficking (COMMIT) process, Myanmar joined five other countries of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) in signing the first ever memorandum of understanding on suppression of such crime in the Asia-Pacific region.

The memorandum lays out methods and areas of cooperation to combat all aspects of human trafficking, encompassing areas of policy and cooperation at the national and international levels, legal frameworks, law enforcement and criminal justice, protection, recovery and reintegration of victims as well as preventive measures.