Vice President Annette Lu (
Making the remarks in a keynote speech delivered at the International Conference on Strategies for Combating Human Trafficking from Southeast Asia to Taiwan yesterday, Lu said that the root problem behind human trafficking is political and economic inequalities, and that the public needs to reflect on whether it is just to use money to enslave others.
Lu told her audience that human trafficking has posed a major problem for Taiwan in recent years, mainly because of frequent exchanges across the Taiwan Strait and the many loopholes in the regulation of those exchanges, which human traffickers have used to their advantage.
Citing statistics from the Ministry of the Interior, Lu said that Taiwanese police arrested a total of 8,164 illegal immigrants between 2001 and last year.
Of the 5,097 women arrested, 2,224, or 44 percent, were engaging in the sex trade, Lu said.
A report by the US Department of State showed that between 700,000 and 4 million people, most of whom are women or children, are being sold every year out of their own countries voluntarily, involuntarily or semi-voluntarily, with Taiwan being one of the importing countries, she said.
The government and the public in the country has been paying close attention to UN treaties and laws against trafficking, Lu said, adding that human trafficking is a severe human-rights violation and that the victims of trafficking must be given assistance and protection.
Elizabeth Bagley, board director of Vital Voices International and former US ambassador to Portugal, said human trafficking was a global plague and a form of modern-day slavery.
The root causes of human trafficking must be addressed with cooperation between the government and civil society in order to successfully tackle the problem, Bagley said.
Brad Schlozman, principal deputy assistant attorney general at the US Department of Justice, said that the government seeks to gain evidence and investigate who the criminals or victims of human trafficking are while care providers, such as NGOs and social workers, provide services and counseling to reverse the harm to the victims, Schlozman said.
"Law enforcement knows they cannot assist the victims to recover from their trauma and regain dignity, but care providers can," Schlozman said. "Care providers, on the other hand, cannot investigate these cases [of trafficking]."
Lin Chung-sen (林中森), Vice Minister of Interior Affairs, said the hardest task at the moment for the police and investigators in the country is clearly identifying the criminals and the victims of human trafficking.
Usually a person is deemed a victim when they are involuntarily brought to Taiwan, beaten or threatened by a broker or have their passports withheld by an agency, Lin said.
He said that effective legislation needs to be designed to prevent trafficking, combat traffickers and ensure the safe repatriation of victims.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the