Taiwan should increase its efforts to prosecute and convict criminals who engage in human trafficking, the US Department of State said on Monday.
The recommendation came in the department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report, which also said that Taiwan needed to “vigorously investigate and prosecute” the owners of fishing vessels who commit abuse and traffic people onboard their boats.
The report calls for increased efforts by Taipei to reduce exploitation of migrant workers by brokers, improved training for anti-trafficking police and improved protection for household caretakers and domestic workers.
Despite the calls for improvement, Taiwan was still ranked in the highest tier 1 category worldwide for fighting human trafficking.
“Taiwan is a destination for men, women and children subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking, and to a much lesser extent a source of men and women subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking,” the report said.
Most people subjected to trafficking in Taiwan are migrant workers from Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, and to a lesser extent China and Cambodia, it said.
According to the report, most of Taiwan’s more than 550,000 migrant workers have low-skilled jobs as home caretakers and domestic workers, or in the farming, manufacturing, construction and fishing industries.
“Some migrant workers are charged exorbitant... recruitment fees, resulting in substantial debts used by brokers or employers as tools of coercion to obtain or retain their labor,” the report said. “After recruitment, fee repayments are garnished from their wages and some foreign workers in Taiwan earn significantly less than the minimum wage,” it said.
The report said that women and girls from China and southeast Asian nations travel to Taiwan through fraudulent marriages and deceptive employment offers intended to lure them into the sex trade.
It also says that Taiwanese women are recruited through classified ads for employment in Japan, Australia, the UK and the US, where they are forced into prostitution.
While Taiwanese authorities were said to fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking, both prosecutors and judges demonstrated “limited understanding” of trafficking crimes.
Over the past 12 months, authorities identified and assisted 86 people caught up in sex trafficking and 206 people put into forced labor in Taiwan — a total of 292 compared with 366 a year earlier.
The report listed China as a tier 2 nation, saying “state-sponsored forced labor continues to be an area of significant concern.”
The report said it was estimated that 320 facilities in China were used to detain individuals to work in factories or mines, build roads or make bricks for no pay for up to four years.
“Well-organized criminal syndicates and local groups play key roles in the trafficking of Chinese women and girls in China,” it said.
Girls from Tibet are reportedly sent throughout China and subjected to forced marriage and domestic servitude, it said.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said when he released the report that in recent decades the US had learned a great deal about how to break up human trafficking networks, and help people recover in safety and dignity.
“In years to come, we will apply those lessons relentlessly and we will not rest until modern slavery is ended,” he said.
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