The U.S. State Department’s annual human trafficking report has placed Japan in Tier Two of its three-tier system, highlighting what it said was Tokyo’s insufficient response to child exploitation in the commercial sex industry and forced labor among migrants, as well a lack of deterrence for offenders.

Current legislation offers limited protection for those coerced into illegal or unregulated actions, the report found, tending to criminalize the behavior of the victim while allowing those who force them to engage in such activities to continue their trafficking operations relatively unpunished.

This year’s Trafficking in Persons Report, released on Tuesday in Washington, gave Japan the same rating for the third year in a row, while acknowledging that the government had made efforts since the last report to increase measures to combat trafficking.

“The Government of Japan does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking but is making significant efforts to do so,” the report said.

Of these efforts, the report highlighted attempts to increase awareness of human trafficking and its effects among the general public. It also pointed to the government’s decision to officially recognize four participants in the troubled Technical Intern Training Program (TITP) as trafficking victims — the first acknowledgment of its kind.

The program, which was created in 1993 as a means to transfer skills and nurture talent in developing countries, has been criticized as a hotbed of exploitation and as a means for human traffickers to entice foreign workers to Japan, where they can be forced to work as victims of “extortion contracts” with severely limited freedoms.

The program came under renewed scrutiny this year, when the government revoked the license of an intermediary company that recruited technical interns from overseas after a Vietnamese construction worker suffered repeated beatings at the hands of his coworkers. It was the 33rd time a permit had been revoked for failures to uphold worker safety obligations since regulations were introduced in 2017.

Highlighting how the Japanese government had failed to meet minimum standards in several key areas, the U.S. report cited a “continued lack of political will to address all forms of trafficking and identify and protect trafficking victims.”

This, the report added, contributed to Japan’s “overall lack of progress” since the last report was published, particularly given the country’s “insufficiently stringent” penalties for human traffickers — generally in the form of suspended prison sentences and the imposition of monetary fines — providing them with a sense of impunity and weakening the deterrent effect.

In the case of child exploitation in the sex industry, the report found that while numerous victims are identified, there is rarely any effort to screen them for trafficking indicators, meaning that they are denied the protection services that human trafficking victims should generally receive.

Elsewhere in East Asia, South Korea was grouped alongside Japan in the report’s second tier, while China and North Korea were again classified in the third tier.

Kari Johnstone, acting director of the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, said several East Asian countries had been downgraded to the lowest tier in the latest report.

“Unfortunately ... there were a number of countries this year within that region that did not make the increasing efforts and receive tangible results to stay on the tier that they were on last year and did, in fact, face downgrades,” she told reporters on Tuesday.

The report said that the Chinese government continues to use forced labor camps to detain Uyghur, ethnic Kyrgyz, Uzbek and other Turkic and Muslim minorities in the country’s northwest, most notably in the Xinjiang region.

The report also highlighted the Chinese government’s reported coercion of Tibetan workers into labor programs, as well as the exploitation of workers — both Chinese nationals and others — involved in the government’s flagship Belt and Road initiative, which the report said now operates in at least 144 countries.