The recent riot involving discontented Thai laborers working on the construction of Kaohsiung City's mass rapid transit system has cast a shadow over Taiwan's human rights record.
It has also been an embarrassment for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) which has long claimed human rights to be a preeminent concern.
Experts say the gap between the DPP's words and the actions it appears to condone is the result of the government's giving preference to the concerns of the business community and Taiwan society's strong bias against people of lower social and economic status, which results in the immature treatment of guest workers.
Before the establishment of the DPP in 1986, some political dissidents were oppressed cruelly by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) as a result of their activities advocating universal values such as democracy, human rights, and social equality. At that time, some of Taiwan's democratic pioneers, including Vice President Annette Lu (
Lu, who now convenes the Presidential Office's Human Rights Advisory Committee, said immediately after last week's riot that the accident had tarnished Taiwan's human-rights record and damaged the nation's image.
Last week, Lu apologized to mistreated Thai workers twice in public.
Even the Presidential Office officially released a statement expressing its looking forward to a probe of the incident because "the incident has had a negative impact on public safety and the nation's image."
Lee Mei-hsien (李美賢), an associate professor at the Graduate School of Southeast Asian Studies of National Chi Nan University, told the Taipei Times that riots involving guest workers in Taiwan could be attributed to policymakers' giving in to pressure from business interests, and the lack of education of society at large.
"Labor brokers in both Thailand and Taiwan know clearly that the weaknesses of the Taiwan government. Unreasonable brokerage terms for guest workers, who are already in a lower social and economic status in Thailand, could be a key factor jeopardizing bilateral relations," Lee said.
Lee said that related regulations set by Taiwan are based on patriarchal concepts.
She also said that the government has no determination to tackle existing management problems involving the violation of labor laws.
"Here in Taiwan, we can tell from advertisements that guest workers are basically seen as working machines rather than valued as human beings. When management abuses workers' human rights, such as keeping their passports, our government does nothing to correct such illegality," she said.
The mass media also smears the image of foreign workers and delivers a great deal of false information, Lee said.
On top of this there is a wealth gap between Taiwanese and foreign workers, most of whom live in poverty on the minimum wage minus extensive deductions.
"In Taiwan, the lack of face-to-face communication opportunities between local people and foreign workers also leads to greater misunderstanding, which hampers management willingness to improve living and working conditions for workers," Lee said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching