TAIPEI (Taiwan News) - A new report by Greenpeace East Asia has published fresh allegations of human rights abuses and people trafficking in the Taiwanese fishing industry. The new claims come despite a new law passed in early 2017 which was intended to protect migrant workers in the fishing industry.

It is not the first time such accusations have leveled against the Taiwanese fishing industry. Taiwan has recently been warned by the EU over practices within the sector which do not reach international standards.

Their report, entitled Misery at Sea, offers new evidence in a number of recent cases of abuse and calls on the Taiwanese authorities to do more to protect the rights of migrant workers in the fishing industry.

The Greenpeace report also criticizes the practice of distant fishing, which sees Taiwanese vessels fishing in international waters far from Taiwan, as a whole. It suggests that it is focused on driving down prices at all costs and suggests the model makes human rights abuses almost inevitable.

Three troubling cases

It revealed that five members of "Giant Ocean" a convicted human trafficking group, are currently living openly in Taiwan. More worryingly, it also claims that at least some of them continue to recruit migrant workers into the Taiwanese fishing industry. Their participation, according to Greenpeace, is known and accepted by Taiwanese authorities.

In a separate matter, the report published new evidence from the Yilan Migrant Fishermen Union, a group which campaigns for the rights of migrant workers in the sector, of the death of Indonesian fisherman Supriyanto.

He arrived in Taiwan as a healthy young man but had died just four months later. The report shows images of Supriyanto, beaten, abused, and painfully thin while working on the Fu Tsz Chiun vessel. It also shows that the vessel continued to operate even in the immediate aftermath of his death.

It claims that the Taiwanese Fisheries Agency failed to adequately investigate his death. The official cause given was simply that he was sick, but that certainly does not appear to fit with the new evidence presented in this report.

There are also revelations of worker abuse which led to the murder in 2016 of the captain of the Tunago No. 61. This fishing vessel was owned and operated by a Taiwanese company but sailed under the flag of Vanuatu.

Six of the crew members, who have subsequently been convicted of his murder, told Greenpeace that they were regularly forced to work 20-hour days, seven days a week and therefore inevitably suffered sleep deprivation. They also said they were routinely subjected to verbal and physical abuse, racial discrimination, and were inadequately fed. All claimed that they feared for their lives.

The role of FCF and the need for regulation

Greenpeace also points the finger at Fong Chun Formosa Fishery Company (FCF), which is based in Kaohsiung and is one of the three biggest fish trading companies in the world. They say that the company has direct links to two of the three cases they highlight in the report (Giant Ocean and the Tunago No. 61 murder) and suggests these cases could be part of a wider trend.

In his conclusion, Greenpeace East Asia’s Global Investigation Lead, Yi Chiao Lee, calls on Taiwanese authorities to do more to address these concerns.

"The Taiwan government must guarantee in-depth investigations of such cases," he says. "It must put in place legislation that protects workers and human rights and ensure full implementation, and companies like FCF must urgently review their business models and put in place the means to ensure that human rights abuses and poor environmental standards endemic to parts of this industry are effectively eliminated."