A new alliance composed of 11 civic groups yesterday called for the passage of a law to address the problem of human trafficking.
The Alliance Against Human Trafficking, which includes groups such as the Women’s Rescue Foundation, the International Campaign to End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism-Taiwan and the Garden of Hope Foundation, was officially launched yesterday.
The first task of the alliance is to push for long-needed special legislation to safeguard against human trafficking, the group said.
“Many criminal organizations in Taiwan are exploiting economically disadvantaged women, children and immigrant workers for labor or prostitution,” said Hsieh Li-kung (謝立�?a professor at the Central Police University’s Department of Border Police.
Given the severity of human trafficking, Taiwan was placed on the Tier 2 watch list of the US Department of State’s human trafficking report last year.
Kao Hsiao-ching (高小晴), executive director of the Women’s Rescue Foundation, spoke of some of the cases she has handled.
An elementary graduate nicknamed Hsiao-hui (小惠) traveled to Taipei believing she would work as an apprentice at a hair salon. She only learned after getting off the train in Taipei that she had been sold into prostitution by her mother for NT$300,000.
“Our existing laws are insufficient to deal with the increasing number of human trafficking cases. We also don’t provide enough protection to human trafficking victims,” Hsieh said.
Protection for foreign victims of human trafficking is especially lacking, since they are often judged as violating the Immigration Law (出入國及移民法) and treated as illegal immigrants, not victims.
The alliance publicized its draft bill on human trafficking, which proposes establishing a victims’ protection network and penalties for labor and sexual exploitation and organ harvesting.
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