Taiwan has no one but itself to blame for its poor record on human sex and labor trafficking, although fortunately this year it was upgraded to the top-tier rank of countries on the US State Department’s annual review.
Despite “significant improvements in preventing modern slavery,” Taiwan still faces accusations by the US government that “some local officials took bribes to turn a blind eye to trafficking and some legislators attempted to influence local Bureau of Labor Affairs’ mediation sessions between employers and migrant workers to the employer’s favor,” the report said.
If the findings are true, it would show that, ironically, government officials may actually be one of the nation’s biggest obstacles to fulfilling its anti-labor trafficking commitments.
Criminal investigations should be immediately launched to identify and charge those officials and legislators who are breaking the law, to clear Taiwan’s name.
However, no one should be surprised to find that some local labor authorities are often negligent, if not criminal, particularly when it comes to labor protections for domestic service workers and caregivers.
It has been a common practice for many years for wealthy families to take advantage of legal loopholes to illegally hire foreign caregivers to work as domestic helpers.
Until now, however, only English teacher Ruby Hsu (徐薇) has been fined for such violations. She received a NT$30,000 fine last week after labor authorities in Taipei found she had abused her foreign caregiver, who was supposed to be taking care of her sick mother-in-law, by forcing her to do housework.
Many feel that Hsu deserves such a fine, but wonder how it is fair when so many others go unpunished.
Labor authorities encourage people to turn in offending neighbors. However, when authorities approve such hiring, shouldn’t they be responsible for preventing abuses of foreign caregivers?
The Council of Labor Affairs’ policies regarding foreign caregivers and workers should be overhauled immediately.
In the area of sex trafficking, Taiwan has had a hard time prosecuting child prostitution cases from outside its borders because the nation is barred from participating in many international organizations and faces difficulties in expanding its diplomatic ties with allies. This problem was mentioned in the US report.
However, that shouldn’t be used as an excuse, especially when there is a legal framework for the nation’s law enforcement to track down offenders.
Among the nearly 100 child sex offenders arrested in six Asian countries between 2007 and 2008, statistics on the International Campaign to End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism Taiwan’s Web Site showed only one Taiwanese man was suspected of engaging in child sex tourism, in 2007.
That figure seems encouraging for Taiwan, although it could simply mean many offenders go undiscovered. To some extent, it also explains why Taiwanese authorities have brought no charges against any such offender since 2006. Though that doesn’t mean the US government’s concerns are groundless, Taiwan can’t fight child sex tourism alone.
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
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