Thirteen Filipino women have been convicted of human trafficking in Cambodia for intending to sell the babies they were carrying through surrogacy.
They were sentenced to four years in prison, two of which were suspended, the Kandal provincial court said.
The court said it had strong evidence that the women intended to have babies “to sell them to a third party in exchange for money, which constitutes an act of human trafficking.”
Women should not serve prison time before giving birth, and the court did not specify what would happen to the babies when they were born.
Surrogacy is illegal in Cambodia, but agencies continue to offer this service.
This case is unusual because surrogate mothers are normally employed in their own country and not transported elsewhere.
The women were found during a police raid on a villa near the capital Phnom Penh on September 23.
After their arrest, Nicholas Felix Ty, an undersecretary at the Philippine Department of Justice, said it was the women themselves who were “victims of human trafficking.”
But Cambodian Interior Minister Chou Bun Eng rejected the idea and said she considered women responsible.
Four Vietnamese women and seven other Filipino women were also arrested, but were not pregnant and were therefore deported, Bun Eng said.
A Cambodian woman was sentenced to two months and a day in prison for being complicit in preparing meals for mothers, the court heard.
Developing countries are popular for surrogacy because the costs are much lower there.
Cambodia's commercial surrogacy industry began booming in 2016 after the practice was made illegal in neighboring Thailand.
Although banned later that year by the Cambodian government, it continued to flourish.
The AFP news agency reported that Chinese couples would pay agencies between $40,000 (£31,600) and $100,000 (£79,000) for a Cambodian woman to carry their child.
In 2017, an Australian nurse who ran a surrogacy clinic was jailed for 18 months in Cambodia.
The following year, 32 surrogate mothers accused of human trafficking in Cambodia were released on the condition that they raise their children themselves.
