An aid worker once described as the "Québécois Father Teresa" is one of two men who were charged Wednesday with sexually assaulting children at a Haitian orphanage.

Quebec City residents Armand Huard, 64, and Denis Rochefort, 59, each face multiple counts of sexual assault under a rarely used law allowing international child-sex crime prosecutions.

Police say the allegations involve 10 boys in their early teens.

The men will face a bail hearing in Quebec City on Thursday.

A Quebec charity internet site named Association Grandir describes Huard as "a veritable Québécois Father Teresa" but says he was better known to Haitian orphans as "Papi" over 12 years of aid work.

Association Grandir did not respond to an e-mail interview request on Wednesday.

One of two suspects ran a Haitian orphanage

Quebec provincial police spokesman Sgt. Richard Gagné said Haitian police received complaints last year that children had been abused at an orphanage in Les Cayes, on the island's southwestern coast.

The Association Grandir site said Huard was recently a director of an orphanage that housed 75 children in the city.

In a Dec. 28 note linked to the site, Huard said he had teamed up with Association Grandir in 2005, raising $20,000 in tax-deductible donations through 2007, when the collaboration ended.

Huard said the orphanage "lacked local support" and also failed to get help from international organizations in Haiti. The note said Huard had returned to Quebec in the spring to organize a relaunch of the orphanage under a new organization named Kad Moun.

"This turn of events did not discourage me," Huard wrote.

"On the contrary, it's a stage. It has allowed me to renew my energies."

Rochefort is not mentioned on the site.

Only one conviction under law

The charges were laid under a 10-year-old law meant to crack down on child-sex tourism that has produced all of one conviction on Canadian soil. Advocates call that record an embarrassment.

"We have one of the worst records in the developing world in enforcing the law," said Benjamin Perrin, a legal scholar and an activist against child exploitation.

Investigators say both Huard and Rochefort have done humanitarian work in Haiti for several years.

Haitian police launched their investigation in 2007 and requested the assistance of the United Nations mission in Haiti.

"It was Haitian police who learned of these events, and they asked peacekeepers, including RCMP officers, to help them," Gagné said. "Then they asked us to help."

Prosecutions rare

In Canada's lone conviction dating back to 2005, former Vancouver resident Donald Bakker pleaded guilty to several counts of sex crimes against Cambodian children after he was caught by Canadian customs officers with video that captured some of the acts.

"Both the Bakker case and this most recent one accidentally fell into [police] laps," said Perrin, an assistant professor of law at the University of British Columbia.

"Canada is once again dragged into this, instead of actively enforcing its laws."

While Canadian prosecutions are rare, Perrin said a federal Justice Department survey found 110 Canadians have been investigated under local laws for child-sex crimes.

"And this is just the people who have been caught," Perrin said. "It's the tip of the iceberg."

'Ad hoc reactions'

David Butt, a secretary with ECPAT International, a group that fights child exploitation, says Canadian law-enforcement agencies aren't equipped to crack down on international child-sex crimes.

"These things are very much ad hoc reactions to things that fall in their laps," said Butt, a Toronto lawyer.

"It's not something where any police agencies are properly resourced or actively involved."

The advocates point to the United States and Australia as better examples.

Australia has prosecuted dozens of Australians for foreign child exploitation by putting police officers in child-sex hot spots and committing money to pursue expensive cases.