The Honorable John F. Kerry
Secretary of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520
Dear Secretary Kerry:
In your recent remarks to the Annual Meeting of the President’s Interagency Task Force to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, you noted that Cambodian men are trafficked to sea to become slaves aboard fishing vessels. As a group of human rights and labor organizations concerned with this issue, we were pleased to see you address it in your remarks. We write today to ask that you ensure the U.S. Department of State takes the next step to putting an end to this practice and downgrade Thailand, whose labor and immigration policies allow trafficking to flourish in the seafood industry and others, to Tier III in the 2014 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report.
The Government of Thailand does not meet the minimum standards of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, nor is it taking real steps to meet those standards. Thailand was placed on the Tier II watch list in the 2013 Trafficking in Persons Report, which documented the Thai Government’s failure to “adequately regulate brokers, reduce the high costs associated with registration, or allow registered migrants to change employers.” The 2013 TIP Report review of Thailand also cited “pervasive trafficking-related corruption and weak interagency coordination” that “continued to impede progress in combating trafficking” in its assessment of the Government’s efforts to combat human trafficking. Nothing about this system has changed significantly in the course of the last year, and the government continues to be at best complacent, at worst complicit, in the trafficking of migrant workers from neighboring countries to provide inexpensive labor for export industries.
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