I refer to the report Suhakam: Punish those who frequent prostitutes pertaining to Suhakam's recommendation to penalise persons who receive services from prostitutes.

I am surprised at the simplistic view taken by the Human Rights Commission in this recommendation of their to eradicate human trafficking, especially of women.

By recommending that persons who receive services from prostitute be penalised so as to discourage trafficking of women, Suhakam is effectively making a simplistic assumption that all prostitutes are foreign women, all foreign women are smuggled into the country and all entertainment centres habour smuggled foreign women who are also prostitutes.

Instead of asking why is it so easy for foreign women to be smuggled into our country, Suhakam has chosen the easy way out by recommending more new rules to be created, which is exactly the same knee-jerk reaction taken by most of our government agencies, for example, the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs when they began copyright piracy.

When respective agencies fail to deliver results, instead of looking to improve the process or hire better qualified people for the job, we opt for erecting more new rules on top of the many we already have.

And what do this new rules do? Nothing short of exactly the same thing most of our existing rules do which is to just exist on paper. Enforcement agencies will go about their businesses of being lackadaisical, inefficient and ineffective while the smugglers and criminal groups continue with business as usual.