December 11, 2014 — Thailand’s military government should cancel a plan to encourage prisoners to work on fishing boats given the widespread abuses in the Thai fishery sector.
On December 4, 2014, Labor Minister Gen. Surasak Kanchanrat announced a plan to send 176 prisoners whose prison terms are up within one year, and who agree, to work on fishing boats in Samut Sakhon province, Thailand’s major fishery hub. The Labor Ministry said 2,830 male detainees in Samut Sakhon Prison are eligible to participate.
“It is dangerously irresponsible for the Labor Ministry to urge prisoners to work on board Thailand’s notoriously abusive fishing fleets,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The Labor Ministry can’t even figure out how to inspect such boats, let alone prevent hundreds of prisoners from being abused by fishing boat crews.”
Research conducted by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the International Labour Organization (ILO), Thai academic institutions, international and national nongovernmental organizations, and global trade union federations have discovered that work on Thai fishing vessels is extremely abusive. Problems include widespread and systematic use of forced labor, frequent physical abuse leading in some cases to extrajudicial killings, excessive work hours ranging up to 20 hours per day, non-payment of wages, inadequate food and medical services, and dangerous working conditions causing many injuries. Fishing boat owners and captains have regularly resisted efforts to effectively regulate conditions of work on fishing boats, while denying that abuses have occurred.
Under the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, adopted by the UN as guidance, prison labor must be of a vocational nature, not used as punishment, and prisoners should be allowed to choose the type of work they wish to perform. The work must not be driven by financial motives, and no prisoner should be forced to work for private entities. In addition, ILO Convention No. 29 on Forced Labor, which Thailand has ratified, states that prison labor for private entities may be only undertaken by consent of the prisoner. The details of how such protections might apply to this plan are unclear given the consistent lack of training provided to new crews on Thai fishing boats, the lack of choices for work other than on fishing boats, and the clear for-profit motives of Thai fishing boat owners.
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