Europe tackles pedophilia cases

Well-known personalities are a key element of another pedophile scandal elsewhere in Europe. Portugal has been traumatized by a case brought to light a year ago in which two top TV personalities, the spokesman for the opposition Socialist party and a former ambassador, have been charged with abusing children from state-run homes for orphans and disabled youngsters.

The government announced last year, after children from the Casa Pia homes had been examined, that 128 of them - mostly deaf-mutes - showed physical signs of repeated abuse. One of the men charged, Carlos Cruz, is Portugal's best-known TV celebrity, and a man so trusted by his fellow citizens he was chosen to lead the publicity campaign introducing the euro into Portugal.

The evidence investigators have gathered since a local newspaper broke the story suggests that children from the Casa Pia homes have been abused since the mid-1970s. Portuguese President Jorge Sampaio promised that "the impunity which for decades on end has made this case a shame for all of us will finally end."

It is still unclear, however, how the abuse continued for so long. A former minister of family affairs, Teresa Costa Macedo, admitted to parliament last year that she had known about it since 1982, when she sent evidence to the police that was never investigated, she said. She kept silent for 20 years, she claimed, because of death threats.

The secrecy that surrounded events at Casa Pia is strikingly absent, however, at the border between Germany and the Czech Republic, where social workers have watched German and other foreign men buy sex from impoverished children for several years, according to a report released last October by UNICEF.

"The commercial sexual exploitation of children in the German-Czech border districts began to flourish in 1996 and has increased substantially in the years since," the report said. "A key reason for the increasing demand is that larger numbers of sex tourists specifically request children." Girls and boys as young as 6 hang out at gas stations, bus stops, and supermarkets on the Czech side of the border, says the report, written by a German social worker who says she has identified around 500 children prostituting themselves.

Little has been done about this open child-sex market, complains Reinhard Schlagintweit, head of the UNICEF office in Germany, in part because "it is very difficult to get evidence sufficient for a court case. We need greater cooperation between the Czech and German police."

Such international police cooperation is at the heart of Europol, which has made Internet child pornography networks a major target of its work. Late last month, acting on information that Europol intelligence analysts had gathered over many months, police in seven European countries, as well as Canada, Australia, and Peru, seized computers, videos, and pornographic pictures from nearly 50 alleged members of pedophile networks.

Says Europol spokesman Mr. Stergioulis: "Europol is in a position to fight this form of crime."

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