A coalition of environmental and labor rights groups yesterday protested outside the Civil Service Development Institute, calling for stricter measures to prevent exploitation of migrant fishers, as government officials and academics met for an annual workshop on human trafficking.
About a dozen protesters from seven groups, including the Taiwan International Workers’ Association (TIWA), the Taiwan Association for Human Rights (TAHR) and Green Peace shouted: “Fix the legal loopholes and stop human trafficking now” on Taipei’s Xinsheng S Road.
“There are currently 700,000 migrant workers in Taiwan who face the risk of human trafficking, but our government is only concerned about holding workshops that make it look good,” TIWA secretary-general Chen Hsiu-lien (陳秀蓮) said.
The International Workshop on Strategies for Combating Human Trafficking is held annually by the Ministry of the Interior. This year, the two-day event featured heavyweight attendees such as Vice President Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁).
“What the government needs to do is ratify the stipulations outlined in the International Labor Organization’s Convention No. 188 [C188],” Chen Hsiu-lien said. “To allow loopholes to continue to exist in regulations is to create opportunities for human trafficking.”
Many migrant fishers are subject to conditions that should be considered human trafficking, but regulations make it difficult for them to be categorized as human trafficking victims and receive government assistance, Serve the People Association director Wong Ying-dah (汪英達) said.
Migrant workers often go into debt as soon as they begin working due to the high commission that agencies charge them, he said, adding that they are also restricted by law from freely changing their employer.
“Because of their debt and miscellaneous expenses that often get docked from their pay, migrant fishers are typically paid about NT$7,000 a month in their first year,” Wong added.
Often, their passports are taken away by their employer and the government considers it legal as long as the worker has signed an agreement allowing it, he said.
In a recent case that Wong handled, a local labor department official’s first reaction to hearing about a migrant worker, whose passport had been taken by their employer, was to ask if there had been any written agreement, he said.
All migrant fishers should be protected by the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) and their employers should be supervised by the Ministry of Labor, TAHR vice secretary-general Shih Yi-hsiang (施逸翔) said.
A large proportion of migrant fishers are not protected by the labor law, because the government considers them to be working outside of Taiwanese territories, and labor inspections on boats are only carried out by the Council of Agriculture’s Fisheries Agency, Shih said, adding that the government should increase the frequency of inspections and set up a mechanism for workers to report abuse in emergency situations.
While the government constantly boasts its achievements in protecting migrant workers’ rights, the first boat that got detained for violating C188 was a Taiwanese fishing boat, Shih added.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods