BBC News Online: World: Americas

Extensive rights abuses in US Pacific territory

A United States senate committee has been hearing accounts of extensive abuses of the rights of foreign workers in a US Pacific territory, the Northern Mariana Islands.

Workers from across Asia are drawn to the Marianas by recruitment agents promising lucrative wages and opportunities to become American citizens.

But the US Interior Secretary, Bruce Babbitt, told the senate committee that numbers of foreign workers were being forced into slave labour and prostitution.

He called for an end to the territory's special exemption from normal US wage and immigration laws.

The islands' administrators insist they're rooting out abuses.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service