Taiwan and the US began cooperating on training law enforcement personnel in identifying and protecting victims after the Human Trafficking Prevention Act (人口販運防治法) was enacted last month, Cabinet officials said yesterday.
Minister without Portfolio Kao Su-po (高思博), who also serves as head of an anti-human trafficking task force, made the remark at a three-day International Workshop on Strategies for Combating Human Trafficking that opened in Taipei yesterday.
The acting director of the American Institute in Taiwan’s Taipei Office, Robert Wang, praised Taiwan at the workshop for its efforts in combating human trafficking.
“Human trafficking is an issue that impacts all countries, including the US,” he said.
“It weakens legal economic activities, causes violence, destroys families and has an impact on education and public security,” he said.
Estimates say there are more than 12 million people who are human trafficking victims around the world, he said.
The global economic crisis has made workers more vulnerable as they struggle to support their families, he said.
“Today, we’re working with Taiwan to make sure that every person in the human trafficking network is punished, and that every victim is well protected,” he said.
Kao said the workshop would train frontline law enforcement personnel in Taiwan about how to identify human trafficking victims and how to protect them.
The first lesson was to distinguish between smugglers and victims.
Law enforcement agencies in Taiwan have been criticized by immigration and human rights groups for treating human trafficking victims as criminals because they can’t differentiate between smugglers and their victims, as well as lack of protection for victims.
Taiwan is not the only country facing this problem.
“One of the biggest global challenges is the failure to make the distinction between [human] trafficking and smuggling,” said Fanny Chu, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement attache in Hong Kong. “Human smuggling may involve elements of violence, however, the presence of these aggravating factors alone does not constitute human trafficking.”
“Elements [of human trafficking] are force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of commercial sex or forced labor,” she said, adding that human smuggling involves people who are voluntarily smuggled into a country, and it has no victims.
It’s important to provide a safe shelter for trafficking victims and grant them rights, such as the right to work so that they would be willing to work with law enforcement agencies to root out human trafficking networks, she said.
A tropical depression east of the Philippines became a tropical storm early yesterday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, less than a week after a typhoon barreled across the nation. The agency issued an advisory at 3:30am stating that the 22nd tropical storm, named Yinxing, of the Pacific typhoon season formed at 2am. As of 8am, the storm was 1,730km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan’s southernmost point, with a 100km radius. It was moving west-northwest at 32kph, with maximum sustained winds of 83kph and gusts of up to 108kph. Based on its current path, the storm is not expected to hit Taiwan, CWA
Residents have called on the Taipei City Government to reconsider its plan to demolish a four-decades-old pedestrian overpass near Daan Forest Park. The 42-year-old concrete and steel structure that serves as an elevated walkway over the intersection of Heping and Xinsheng roads is to be closed on Tuesday in preparation for demolition slated for completion by the end of the month. However, in recent days some local residents have been protesting the planned destruction of the intersection overpass that is rendered more poetically as “sky bridge” in Chinese. “This bridge carries the community’s collective memory,” said a man surnamed Chuang
FATALITIES: The storm claimed at least two lives — a female passenger in a truck that was struck by a falling tree and a man who was hit by a utility pole Workers cleared fallen trees and shop owners swept up debris yesterday after one of the biggest typhoons to hit the nation in decades claimed at least two lives. Typhoon Kong-rey was packing winds of 184kph when it slammed into eastern Taiwan on Thursday, uprooting trees, triggering floods and landslides, and knocking out power as it swept across the nation. A 56-year-old female foreign national died from her injuries after the small truck she was in was struck by a falling tree on Provincial Highway 14A early on Thursday. The second death was reported at 8pm in Taipei on Thursday after a 48-year-old man
A tropical depression east of the Philippines became a tropical storm earlier today, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The 22nd tropical storm, named Yinxing, in this year's Pacific typhoon season formed at 2am, the CWA said. As of 8am, the storm was 1,730km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻) with a 100km radius, it said. It was moving west-northwest at 32kph, with maximum sustained winds of 83kph and gusts of up to 108kph. Based on its current path, the storm is not expected to hit Taiwan, CWA meteorologist Huang En-hung (黃恩宏) said. However, a more accurate forecast would be made on Wednesday, when Yinxing is
RSS