Thailand remains blacklisted by US for human trafficking

BANGKOK (AP) — Thai authorities are upset about being blacklisted by the US for the second year in a row for failing to do enough to combat modern-day slavery.

The US State Department said Monday that labor abuses in the Southeast Asian country’s seafood sector are persistent, abusive and largely ignored by the government. Those abuses have been widely documented in a series of stories this year by The Associated Press which tracked the supply chains of major US retailers to Thai processors selling slave-caught seafood. Those reports have prompted rescues and repatriations of more than 800 men this year.

Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chanocha said yesterday that Thailand was working on solving the issues and that the assessment was made when his administration, which took over after a military coup last year, was beginning to address the problems.

“We just have to keep working and not to worry. It’s an issue of international rules, so we’ll have to follow,” he told reporters. “Don’t worry too much. Their assessment was up to them as they were the ones assessing, not us. We just do our job. What they said in the assessment, we fixed every part of it, but some issues are quicker to fix and some are slow.”

The State Department said Monday that Thai, Burmese, Cambodian, and Indonesian men are still subjected to forced labor on Thai fishing boats.

“Some men remain at sea for several years, are paid very little or irregularly, work as much as 18 to 20 hours per day for seven days a week, or are threatened and physically beaten,” the report said.

The Royal Thai embassy in Washington denounced the assessment, saying Thailand has made substantial efforts with concrete results to stop human trafficking.

“Significant progress has been made across the board,” the embassy said in a statement, stressing the State Department report “does not accurately reflect the reality and fails to take into account significant efforts undertaken by the Thai government.”