Anti-human trafficking coalition launches campaign to boycott cashews from Vietnam - NAM

Anti-human trafficking coalition launches campaign to boycott “blood cashews” from Vietnam - NAM

Source: News Media America

Jun 13, 2012 

 Coalition to Abolish Modern-day Slavery in Asia (CAMSA) calls on consumers around the globe to boycott cashews exported by Vietnam because they are a product of modern-day slavery.

Human Rights Watch, in its publication titled "The Rehab Archipelago," reports that forced labor has been used in drug rehabilitation centers across Vietnam, where inmates have to husk and peel cashews, working six to seven hours a day for $3 a month. According to the report, between 2000 and 2010, over 309,000 people passed through 56 drug detention centers inVietnam. Cashew export brings in 1.5 billion US dollars a year for Vietnam.

At a recent hearing before the US Congress, Dr. Nguyen Dinh Thang, Executive Director of Boat People SOS (BPSOS), reported that Vietnamese prisoners, including political prisoners, have similarly been subjected to forced labor: "One Montagnard, jailed from 2002 through 2009, had to do this for 7 years. His hands were injured by the caustic resin from the cashew nuts because he was not allowed to wear gloves."

Speaking for CAMSA, Mr. Vu Quoc Dung, Secretary General of Germany-based International Society for Human Rights, denounces the dangerous cashew work in prisons such as the Z30A Prison in Xuan Loc, where political prisoners are forced each to process 32 kg of class B cashews daily. Some prisoners have developed blindness as a result. Many have suffered injuries to their faces and hands. Those failing to meet the assigned quota would be beaten with a whip and kicked. Political prisoners who oppose forced labor have reportedly been shackled and held in solitary confinement. Read more here.  

Attorney helping human trafficking victims find way to escape | Houston & Texas News | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

By LISE OLSEN
HOUSTON CHRONICLE

June 9, 2011, 10:51PM

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Michael Paulsen Chronicle

Attorney An Phong Vo's work with asylum-seekers is now taking her to Bangkok.

After 10 days in a Jordan sewing factory, Phuong-Anh Vu knew she'd been tricked: Her first paycheck was $10 — a tenth of the promised pay, meals were barely enough to survive and when she and other Vietnamese workers protested, the owner summoned police.

"Policemen pulled on their hair and beat their heads on the beds and on the ground, and there was blood everywhere," said Vu, who led a strike and eventually fled to Thailand and finally Houston.

Her daring rebellion and escape - as well as years spent with other trafficking victims in transit in Thailand - helped motivate the Houston office of the nonprofit Vietnamese American Boat People SOS to ramp up its outreach to asylum seekers in Asia.

Her story and the stories of others like her also provided personal motivation and a new mission for human rights activist An Phong Vo, an attorney based at the nonprofit's West Houston office who began working with trafficking victims in 2007. Along the way, Vo became one of the leading U.S. experts in helping victims to obtain special visas to stay in the United States and stabilize their lives.

Now, Vo's calling will take her to Bangkok, where she will try to aid an estimated 500 asylum-seekers - including victims of human trafficking - living in donated apartments after fleeing oppression from Vietnam and slavery conditions in other countries.

People in need

Vo, who escaped Vietnam as a child and fluently speaks Vietnamese, graduated from law school at Louisiana State University. Almost immediately, she began helping 20 women trafficking victims who resettled in Houston after fleeing conditions exposed in a criminal case against the owners of the Daewoosa sweatshop in American Samoa.

Later, she assisted Central American women held prisoner and ultimately freed from traffickers after a federal raid of cantinas in Houston. She also helped some women reunite with the children they left behind in their home countries. She began to assist many Vietnamese Americans harmed in recent hurricanes, as well.

In April on a preliminary visit to Bangkok for her new assignment, Vo met with asylum-seekers in Bangkok. Many were too afraid of arrest and deportation to leave their apartments; some children had no schooling or toys and had to sit silently for hours to avoid detection.

Vo, who spent three years in a refugee camp as a child, became convinced the project would be worth the risk, both personal and professional, to go abroad to help.

"It is the chance of a lifetime to be able to do groundwork and provide assistance," Vo said. "And Thailand is the hub of what's happening with international organizations and civil society in Asia. So I'd like to be in the midst of that."

Finding inspiration

The story of Phuong-Anh Vu's recent escape helped provide additional inspiration to Vo and others in Houston after the human trafficking victim and strike leader resettled here last year. It was Vo's mentor, Boat People SOS's executive director Nguyen Dinh Thang, based at the organization's Virginia office, who supplied Vu with money she needed to survive and to escape from captivity at the Jordan factory in 2007.

In an interview, Vu, now a Houston Community College student, said she'd been living in a remote village in the jungles of Northern Vietnam when she heard she could earn a $10,000 salary plus expenses by taking a three-year contract at a Taiwanese-owned sewing factory in Jordan. But after she joined about 275 others at the factory, they were locked inside a walled compound and forced to work 15-hour days, seven days a week.

Vu organized a strike and later found a cellphone to call a reporter who posted a plea for help on a website. The first cellphone response came from Thang, the BPSOS executive director in America.

"I asked him where was America," Vu remembers. "I didn't know."

Thang sent an envoy to Jordan with $3,000 cash to help.

Vu escaped to Thailand and, after nearly three years of paperwork, was allowed to immigrate to America.

But neither she nor Vo have forgotten others left behind.

"I want to ask for help not from Vietnamese-Americans only, but from all Americans to maybe skip one breakfast or one coffee to help Boat People SOS so they can help someone like me or a woman in the same situation because I've been there," she said.

lise.olsen@chron.com

Read more: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7604063.html#ixzz1OuUu4hD0

Attorney helping human trafficking victims find way to escape | Houston & Texas News | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle