Nine Taiwanese have been indicted on charges related to the forced labor and abuse of migrant workers on a distant-water fishing vessel, the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office said on Wednesday.
The foreign crew of the Vanuata-flagged Da Wang (大旺), owned and operated by Kaohsiung-based Yong Feng Fishery (永豐國際生物科技公司), were subject to beatings, insults, confinement, and threats to withhold or deduct wages while working in the Pacific Ocean in 2019 and 2020, prosecutors said.
The vessel’s captain surnamed Lin (林), first mate surnamed Liang (梁) and seven others were indicted for their roles in the abuse of more than 20 Indonesian and Philippine workers, prosecutors said.
Photo: CNA
In some incidents aboard the vessel, Lin and Liang threw fishers’ clothes into the ocean, despite cold temperatures, prosecutors said.
Some Muslim workers were forced to eat pork to survive, as it was often used in meals while at sea, they said.
Liang was also involved in an incident in which a migrant fisher fell to the deck after being struck on the back of the head, prosecutors said, adding that the worker was found dead days after.
An autopsy performed at the Port of Suva in Fiji determined that the fisher died of pulmonary edema, caused by excess fluids in the lungs, they said.
Although the cause of death could not be directly linked to being hit on the head, the incident prompted 19 foreign crew members to quit over physical abuse aboard the ship, prosecutors said.
Although Taiwan has one of the world’s largest distant-water fishing fleets, migrant fishers lack adequate protections, prosecutor Liao Wei-cheng (廖偉程) said.
The “lawlessness” on distant-water fishing vessels leaves migrant workers vulnerable to exploitation, Liao added.
The treatment of fishers on the Da Wang was highlighted in the 2019 Greenpeace Southeast Asia report Seabound: The Journey to Modern Slavery on the High Seas, which detailed the abuse of migrant workers on distant-water fishing vessels, including excessive overtime of more than 20 hours per day and the death of a worker.
In July 2020, the US Customs and Border Protection issued a Withhold Release Order against seafood caught with what it said was reasonable suspicion of forced labor, physical violence, debt bondage, withholding of wages and abusive living conditions on the Da Wang.
The agency in January seized the catch of the ship, and announced it had determined that the Da Wang had used forced labor after investigations found evidence aboard the vessel of all 11 indicators developed by the International Labour Organization to assess forced labor conditions.
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