A senior United Nations official is demanding that her colleagues involved in the sex trade in Bosnia should be stripped of their immunity and prosecuted.

Madeleine Rees, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Bosnia, has broken ranks to demand that UN officials, international peacekeepers and police who are involved in sex crimes be brought to justice in their home countries.

Speaking exclusively to Scotland on Sunday, the British lawyer has also launched an outspoken attack on her former boss. She accuses Jacques Paul Klein, the former head of the UN Mission in Bosnia, of not taking UN complicity in the country’s burgeoning sex trade seriously enough.

In recent years there has been a massive increase in the trafficking of women in Bosnia, including girls as young as 12. The women are taken from their homes in eastern Europe by organised criminal gangs and brought to Bosnia, where they are forced into prostitution.

The trade in these so-called ‘sex slaves’ hardly existed until the mid-1990s.