Human Trafficking in Thailand

Human Trafficking In Thailand

Thailand is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women and children trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor. Thailand’s relative prosperity attracts migrants from neighboring countries who flee conditions of poverty and, in the case of Burma, military repression. Significant illegal migration to Thailand presents traffickers with opportunities to coerce or defraud undocumented migrants into involuntary servitude or sexual exploitation.

Women and children are trafficked from Burma, Cambodia, Laos, the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.), Vietnam, Russia and Uzbekistan for commercial sexual exploitation in Thailand. A number of women and girls from Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam are trafficked through Thailand’s southern border to Malaysia for sexual exploitation. Ethnic minorities such as northern hill tribe peoples who have not received legal residency or citizenship are at high risk for trafficking internally and abroad, including to Bahrain, Australia, South Africa, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Hong Kong, Europe and the United States. Some Thai men who migrate for low-skilled contract work to Taiwan, South Korea, Israel, the United States and Gulf states are subjected to conditions of forced labor and debt bondage after arrival.

Following voluntary migration to Thailand, men, women, and children, primarily from Burma, are subjected to conditions of forced labor in agriculture, factories, construction, commercial fisheries and fish processing, domestic work and begging. Thai laborers working abroad in Taiwan, Malaysia, the United States and the Middle East often pay large recruitment fees prior to departure, creating a debt which in some cases may be unlawfully exploited to coerce them into very long terms of involuntary labor. Children from Burma, Laos and Cambodia are trafficked into forced begging and exploitative labor in Thailand.

Four key sectors of the Thai economy (fishing, construction, commercial agriculture and domestic work) rely heavily on undocumented Burmese migrants, including children, as cheap and exploitable laborers. The Government of Thailand does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so. In November 2007, the Thai National Legislative Assembly passed a new comprehensive anti-trafficking law which the Thai government reported would take effect in June 2008. While there were no criminal prosecutions of forced labor cases during the reporting period, Thai authorities in March 2008 conducted a raid on a shrimp processing factory in Samut Sakhon province, rescuing 300 Burmese victims of forced labor. The Ministry of Labor subsequently released guidelines on how it will apply stronger measures to identified labor trafficking cases in the future. Nevertheless, the Thai government has yet to initiate prosecutions of the owners of a separate Samut Sakhon shrimp processing factory from which 800 Burmese men, women and children were rescued from conditions of involuntary servitude, including physical and psychological abuse and confinement, in September 2006. The factory remains in operation.