In its 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report, the US government said Taiwan still has quite a long way to go in preventing human trafficking, prosecuting human traffickers and protecting victims of human trafficking. Just as the government and civic organizations were working hard together to uphold Taiwan’s reputation, a scandal erupted involving the National Immigration Agency’s (NIA) Taichung City Specialized Operation Brigade chief abusing his powers to act in an obscene manner and sexually assault detained female foreign laborers. This single incident could negate years of hard work and requires the government to act quickly.
In Taiwan, foreign laborers are seen as guest workers making up for temporary labor shortages and their working conditions are the worst of any in the country. Their rights and individual freedoms are greatly restricted by employers and legal regulations. Their situation is much tougher than in Hong Kong or Singapore.
The placement fees they have to pay are higher than in other Asian countries and the conditions for switching employers are also stricter than in Hong Kong or Singapore. They cannot live away from their employers and they have very limited time off work. They are also faced with the constant threat of repatriation for no reason by their employers.
All these issues mean that the human rights of foreign laborers are at a very low level and such problems are the reason why increasing numbers of foreign workers run away from their jobs.
Although the Ministry of Justice has established principles for identifying discrimination toward foreign laborers, these principles are not applied by law enforcement and prosecutors when arresting runaway workers, who are simply treated as criminals.
A closer look at the main reasons why foreign laborers run away, however, shows that they do so for the same reason as forced laborers around the world. Many of those who break the law or violate regulations are in fact victims of forced labor. Corrupt immigration, police, judicial and labor affairs officials are accomplices to these crimes.
International reviews of the implementation of regulations to prevent human trafficking in different countries look into implementation efficiency, the severity of sentences for human traffickers and how corrupt civil servants facilitating human trafficking to make a profit are dealt with.
In 2007, the US government’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices said: “Taiwan generally respected the human rights of its citizens; however, there continued to be problems reported in the following areas: corruption by officials, violence and discrimination against women, trafficking in persons and abuses of foreign workers.”
At that time, just before their duties were handed over to the newly established immigration agency, unscrupulous foreign affairs police made use of sloppy administrative practices to collude with human trafficking syndicates by forging re-entry permits or staging false arrests to extort large sums of money from foreign laborers, thereby controlling, mistreating and exploiting them. These actions damaged Taiwan’s international image.
In the more than two years since the immigration agency was established, it has been surrounded by controversy, some say because the police officers transferred to the agency are incompetent.
I, however, believe this is not an adequate excuse. Systemic improvements are necessary. The main reason for these problems could be that the internal review mechanism was not well established when the agency was created.
Before the agency was established, every arrest of a foreign laborer was reviewed afterward. The senior reviewer could check records and other related information to determine whether a police officer had broken the law. The reviewer sometimes directly interviewed the foreign laborer in an attempt to eradicated irregularities.
Power must be kept in check. Foreign laborers are in a much more precarious situation than local residents. This often invites corruption.
In the past, police had systems in place for supervising police ethics to prevention and control misconduct, but from time to time, we still heard of them breaching discipline and breaking the law.
With the establishment of the immigration agency, the insufficiency of its resources calls for serious attention to whether or not the internal system for ethics supervision can prevent irregularities from occurring, but we can only hope that the sexual abuse scandal involving the Taichung officer will be the last ever case of its kind.
Sandy Yeh is a board member of the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry