Expanding democracy is only the effective strategy to eventually eliminate modern-day slavery and achieve human rights and social justice, the winner of the sixth Asian Democracy and Human Rights Award (ADHRA) said yesterday.
“It is not coincidence that a vast number of countries with good human rights records have a democratic system of governance” because it requires not only a top-down approach to implement national policy, but also the involvement of grassroots civil society to crack down on human trafficking, said Boat People SOS (BPSOS) executive director Nguyen Oinh Thang, whose group won this year’s ADHRA, in his acceptance speech before the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy (TFD) at the award ceremony in Taipei.
Founded in 1980, the national Vietnamese American community organization, has dedicated itself to assisting asylum seekers to resettle their lives in various countries through cooperation with state governments and non-governmental organizations worldwide.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
It also aims to build a solid civil society in Asia through direct intervention in individual refugee and human-trafficking cases and advocacy of law and fact-based policies in democratic countries that address how non-democratic governments suppress their people.
Having worked with countries including Russia, Japan, Canada, Philippines and many others, Thang said that he had never seen a country like Taiwan, which has such a strong determination and political will to combat human-trafficking and which has made so much progress in such a short time.
However, he said there was a long-standing problem in Taiwan concerning the lack of institutional protection for migrant workers employed as domestic helpers, saying Taiwan’s Human -Trafficking -Prevention Act (人口販運防制法) “has yet to protect the nursing and home care industry.”
Despite that, Thang said the efforts made by Taiwan in anti-human trafficking was highly recognized, saying that Taiwan has been placed in the “Tier 1” category of the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report for the second year in a row.
The secret behind Taiwan’s successful story, Thang said, was cooperation and partnership between the government and anonymous individuals, as well as non--governmental organizations, in rescuing victims and enforcing the Human Trafficking Prevention Act.
In the early years of its establishment, BPSOS persuaded governments to launch coordinated efforts to fight pirates in the Gulf of Thailand and rescued more than 3,300 Vietnamese boat people at sea and brought them to safety.
In the early 1990s, as more governments established diplomatic ties with Vietnam’s communist government, despite its refusal to respect human rights and freedom, and redefined Vietnamese boat people as economic migrants rather than freedom seekers, BPSOS confronted this threat and advocated the internationally recognized principle of “non-refoulement,” which calls for the protection of refugees from return to countries where their lives or freedoms might be threatened.
Since 1999, BPSOS has fought the global explosion of human trafficking, especially in labor exports. With its headquarters located in the US, BPSOS now has 18 offices across the US, and four more in Taiwan and Southeast Asia.
Thang received a trophy from President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and a US$100,000 cash prize from Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平), who also serves as TFD chairman.
Ma praised Thang for his dedication and contributions to combating human-trafficking and reaffirmed his administration’s determination to continue to pursue human rights.
“Implementing human rights enshrined in the two UN human rights covenants has been one of the basic national policies of the country. When we have become a country that confers an award to others, we have to work harder,” Ma said.
AGING: While Japan has 22 submarines, Taiwan only operates four, two of which were commissioned by the US in 1945 and 1946, and transferred to Taiwan in 1973 Taiwan would need at least 12 submarines to reach modern fleet capabilities, CSBC Corp, Taiwan chairman Chen Cheng-hung (陳政宏) said in an interview broadcast on Friday, citing a US assessment. CSBC is testing the nation’s first indigenous defense submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, Narwhal), which is scheduled to be delivered to the navy next month or in July. The Hai Kun has completed torpedo-firing tests and is scheduled to undergo overnight sea trials, Chen said on an SET TV military affairs program. Taiwan would require at least 12 submarines to establish a modern submarine force after assessing the nation’s operational environment and defense
A white king snake that frightened passengers and caused a stir on a Taipei MRT train on Friday evening has been claimed by its owner, who would be fined, Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC) said yesterday. A person on Threads posted that he thought he was lucky to find an empty row of seats on Friday after boarding a train on the Bannan (Blue) Line, only to spot a white snake with black stripes after sitting down. Startled, he jumped up, he wrote, describing the encounter as “terrifying.” “Taipei’s rat control plan: Release snakes on the metro,” one person wrote in reply, referring
The coast guard today said that it had disrupted "illegal" operations by a Chinese research ship in waters close to the nation and driven it away, part of what Taipei sees a provocative pattern of China's stepped up maritime activities. The coast guard said that it on Thursday last week detected the Chinese ship Tongji (同濟號), which was commissioned only last year, 29 nautical miles (54km) southeast of the southern tip of Taiwan, although just outside restricted waters. The ship was observed lowering ropes into the water, suspected to be the deployment of scientific instruments for "illegal" survey operations, and the coast
Taiwan’s two cases of hantavirus so far this year are on par with previous years’ case numbers, and the government is coordinating rat extermination work, so there should not be any outbreaks, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director-General Philip Lo (羅一鈞) said today in an interview with the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper). An increase in rat sightings in Taipei and New Taipei City has raised concerns about the spread of hantavirus, as rats can carry the disease. In January, a man in his 70s who lived in Taipei’s Daan District (大安) tested positive posthumously for hantavirus, Taiwan’s
RSS