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Major Flaws Found in Thailand’s Human-Trafficking Crackdown – Special Report
Police Major General Thatchai Pitaneelaboot rests during a trek through a forest to locate a trafficking camp in Satun, southern Thailand March 27, 2014. Thatchai is leading a campaign against human trafficking in the region.
SATUN – After a two-hour trek through swamp and jungle, Police Major General Thatchai Pitaneelaboot halts in a trash-strewn clearing near Thailand’s remote border with Malaysia.
“This is it,” he says, surveying the remains of a deserted camp on a hillside pressed flat by the weight of human bodies.
Just weeks before, says Thatchai, hundreds of Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar were held captive here by one of the shadowy gangs who have turned southern Thailand into a human-trafficking superhighway.
Suspected Uighurs are transported back to a detention facility in the town of Songkhla in southern Thailand after visiting women and children at a separate shelter
With Thatchai’s help, Thailand is scrambling to show it is combating the problem. It aims to avoid a downgrade in an influential U.S. State Department annual report that ranks countries on their anti-trafficking efforts.
But a Reuters examination of that effort exposes flaws in how Thailand defines human trafficking, exemplified by its failure to report the lucrative trafficking of thousands of Rohingya confirmed in Reuters investigations published in July and December.
In March, Thailand submitted a 78-page report on its trafficking record for 2013 to the State Department. Thai officials provided a copy to Reuters. In the report, Thailand includes no Rohingya in its tally of trafficked persons.
“We have not found that the Rohingya are victims of human trafficking,” the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. “In essence, the Rohingya question is an issue of human smuggling.”
The distinction between smuggling and trafficking is critical to Thailand’s assertion. Smuggling, done with the consent of those involved, differs from trafficking, the business of trapping people by force or deception into labor or prostitution.
A two-part Reuters investigation in three countries, based on interviews with people smugglers, human traffickers and Rohingya who survived boat voyages from Myanmar, last year showed how the treatment of Rohingya often constituted trafficking. Reporters found that hundreds were held against their will in brutal trafficking camps in the Thai wilderness.
A record 40,000 Rohingya passed through the camps in 2013, according to Chris Lewa, director of Arakan Project, a humanitarian group.
Police Major General Thatchai Pitaneelaboot (L) listens as a Rohingya trafficking victim leads a police unit to a camp where he was detained in Satun, southern Thailand
The Rohingya’s accelerating exodus is a sign of Muslim desperation in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, also known as Burma. Ethnic and religious tensions simmered during 49 years of military rule. But under the reformist government that took power in March 2011, Myanmar has endured its worst communal bloodshed in generations.
After arriving by boat to Thailand, criminal networks transport Rohingya mainly into neighboring Malaysia, a Muslim-majority country viewed by Rohingya as a haven from persecution. Many are held by guards with guns and beaten until they produce money for passage across the Thai border, usually about $2,000 each – a huge sum for one of the world’s most impoverished peoples.
Thailand faces an automatic downgrade to Tier 3, the lowest rank in the U.S. government’s Trafficking In Persons (TIP) Report, unless it makes “significant efforts” to improve its record, according to the State Department. The agency is expected to release its findings in June.
“GRIEVOUS RIGHTS ABUSES”
A Tier 3 designation would put the Southeast Asian country alongside North Korea and the Central African Republic as the world’s worst centers of human trafficking, and would expose Thailand to U.S. sanctions.
If Thailand is downgraded, the United States, in practice, is unlikely to sanction the country, one of its oldest treaty allies in Asia. But to be downgraded would be a major embarrassment to Thailand, which is now lobbying hard for a non-permanent position on the United Nations Security Council.
Armed police provide security to Police Major General Thatchai Pitaneelaboot as they sail up a river in towards a trafficking camp in Satun, southern Thailand
Reuters asked New York-based Human Rights Watch to review the report that Thailand recently submitted to the State Department. The watchdog group, which monitors trafficking and other abuses globally, said it was concerned that two-thirds of the trafficking victims cited in the report were Thai nationals.
“Any examination of trafficking in Thailand shows that migrants from neighboring countries are the ones most trafficked,” said Brad Adams, the group’s Asia director. “Yet Thailand’s identification statistics show far more Thais than migrants are found as victims.”
He added that the numbers were also flawed due to the absence of Rohingya among the list of trafficking victims. Thailand failed to recognize “the grievous rights abuses the Rohingya suffer in these jungle camps, and the fundamental failures of the Thai government to do much about it.”
The State Department said it is examining Thailand’s submission. “We have received the information from the Thai government, and it is currently under review,” Ambassador at-Large Luis CdeBaca of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons said in a statement to Reuters.
“PLIGHT OF THE ROHINGYA”
The next TIP Report will appraise Thailand’s anti-trafficking efforts in 2013.
That year ended with the State Department and the United Nations calling for investigations into the findings of a December 5 report by Reuters. That article uncovered a secret Thai policy to remove Rohingya refugees from Thailand’s immigration detention centers and deliver them to human traffickers waiting at sea.
Suspected Uighurs from China’s troubled far-western region of Xinjiang, rest inside a temporary shelter after they were detained at the immigration regional headquarters near the Thailand-Malaysia border in Hatyai, Songkhla
Thailand made “significant progress” in combating human trafficking in 2013, said its foreign ministry, citing data included in the recent 78-page report Bangkok submitted to the State Department.
According to the Thai report, Thailand convicted 225 people for human trafficking in 2013, compared to 49 people in 2012. (According to the State Department, Thailand convicted only 10 people in 2012.)
The report said Thailand identified 1,020 trafficking victims in 2013, compared to 592 in 2012, and almost doubled the government’s anti-trafficking budget to 235 million baht ($7.3 million).
It identified victims by nationality, counting 141 people from Myanmar among the victims. But none were Rohingya, who are mostly stateless. The Myanmar government calls the Rohingya illegal “Bengali” migrants from Bangladesh. Most of the 1.1 million Rohingya living in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State are denied citizenship.
In January 2013, said the Thai report, more than 400 Rohingya illegal migrants were found in rubber plantations near the Thai-Malay border in Thailand’s Songkhla province. Seven Thai suspects were arrested and charged with smuggling and harboring of illegal migrants, and were later convicted.
The Thai report describes this group of Rohingya as being smuggled, not trafficked.
However, the Reuters article in December documented a clandestine Thai policy to remove those Rohingya from immigration detention centers and deliver them to human traffickers and smugglers waiting at sea. Many Rohingya were then ferried back to brutal trafficking camps in Thailand, where some died.
A suspected Uighur from China’s troubled far-western region of Xinjiang, rests inside a temporary shelter after being detained at the immigration regional headquarters near the Thailand-Malaysia border in Hat Yai, Songkhla
The official Thai report said the government “has taken every effort to suppress the smuggling of Rohingyas over the years and to reduce the risk of Rohingyas being exploited by transnational trafficking syndicates.”
“The plight of the Rohingyas who left their homeland is essentially one of people smuggling, not one that is typical of human trafficking,” said the report.
Pongthep Thepkanjana, the caretaker deputy prime minister, said he would not speculate on whether Thailand’s efforts were enough for an upgrade on the U.S. trafficking rankings.
“We don’t do this just to satisfy the United States,” Pongthep, who chairs Thailand’s national committee to implement anti-trafficking policy, told Reuters. “We do this because trafficking in persons is a bad thing.”
HUNTSVILLE, THAILAND
The anti-trafficking efforts of Police Major General Thatchai are part of that undertaking.
At the abandoned camp he recently examined, Thatchai said scores of Rohingya were beaten until relatives agreed to pay for their release and onward passage to Malaysia. Other Rohingya have died of abuse or disease in nearby trafficking camps whose locations were revealed by the December 5 Reuters report.
Thatchai took charge of the region’s anti-trafficking efforts in October. He has vowed to shut the trafficking camps, break up the gangs and jail their leaders.
“They torture, they extort, they kill,” said Thatchai, 46, who speaks in an American accent picked up while earning a doctorate in criminal justice in Texas. “It’s too much, isn’t it?”
Police Major General Thatchai Pitaneelaboot points to a pier where a Rohingya trafficking victim was brought ashore in Satun, southern Thailand
His campaign has freed nearly 900 people from camps and other trafficking sites and unearthed new detail about criminal syndicates in southern Thailand.
Well-oiled Rohingya-smuggling networks are now being used to transport other nationalities in large numbers, said Thatchai. He said he has identified at least six smuggling syndicates in southern Thailand, all run by Thai Muslims.
This year, along with hundreds of Rohingya, he has also detained about 200 illegal migrants from Bangladesh, as well as nearly 300 people claiming to be Turks but believed to be Uighur Muslims from China’s restive province of Xinjiang.
Like officials in Bangkok, Thatchai generally characterized the transporting of Rohingya through Thailand as human smuggling, not human trafficking.
At the same time, he said his aim was to disrupt the camps through raids and use testimony from victims to unravel the networks. He hopes to gather enough evidence to convict southern Thailand’s two main people-smuggling kingpins on human trafficking charges.
One target lived in Ranong, a Thai port city overlooking Thailand’s maritime border with Myanmar. This suspect, Thatchai said, sells Rohingya to the other syndicates. They then resell the Rohingya at marked-up prices to Thai fishing boats, where bonded or slave labor is common, or take them to camps to beat more money from them – usually a sum equivalent to about $2,000.
The Ranong kingpin made about 10 million baht ($310,000) a month this way, alleged Thatchai, and owned dozens of pick-up trucks to move his human cargo.
“THERE WAS TORTURE”
The second suspect was a leader of a syndicate in the province of Satun. That gang is believed to operate a string of camps along the province’s border with Malaysia – including the abandoned camp Reuters visited with Thatchai on March 27.
At least 400 Rohingya, including many women and children, were held at that camp for up to a month, said Thatchai. The Rohingya were guarded by armed men and fed two meals of instant noodles a day.
Police Major General Thatchai Pitaneelaboot (2nd R) stands at an abandoned trafficking camp his team are investigating in a remote rubber plantation in Songkhla, southern Thailand
“Today we have proved that what the victim said is true,” Thatchai said after the site visit. “There was a camp. There was torture and kidnapping.”
But Thatchai also said he thinks no amount of raids and arrests in Thailand will staunch the flow of Rohingya out of Myanmar’s Rakhine State.
Deadly clashes between Rohingya and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists erupted in Buddhist-majority Myanmar in 2012, leaving hundreds dead and thousands homeless, most of them Rohingya.
Since then, about 80,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar by boat, according to the Arakan Project.
More look set to follow, after attacks by ethnic Rakhine mobs in late March forced foreign aid workers to evacuate the state capital of Sittwe. This has jeopardized the delivery of food and water to tens of thousands of Rohingya.
(By Andrew R.C. Marshall and Amy Sawitta Lefevre reported from Bangkok. Additional reporting by Jason Szep in Washington. Editing by Jason Szep, Bill Tarrant and Michael Williams.) – (Reuters)
A recent report indicates that since Trudeau’s announcement of his gun buyback program four years ago, almost none of the banned firearms have been surrendered.
The federal government plans to purchase 2,063 firearm models from retailers following the enactment of Bill C-21, which amends various Acts and introduces certain consequential changes related to firearms. It was granted royal assent on December 15 of last year.
This ban immediately criminalized the actions of federally-licensed firearms owners regarding the purchase, sale, transportation, importation, exportation, or use of hundreds of thousands of rifles and shotguns that were previously legal.
The gun ban focused on what it termed ‘assault-style weapons,’ which are, in reality, traditional semi-automatic rifles and shotguns that have enjoyed popularity among hunters and sport shooters for over a century.
In May 2020, the federal government enacted an Order-in-Council that prohibited 1,500 types of “assault-style” firearms and outlined specific components of the newly banned firearms. Property owners must adhere to the law by October 2023.
Trudeau’s Buyback Hasn’t Happened
“In the announcement regarding the ban, the prime minister stated that the government would seize the prohibited firearms, assuring that their lawful owners would be ‘grandfathered’ or compensated fairly.” “That hasn’t happened,” criminologist Gary Mauser told Rebel News.
Mauser projected expenses ranging from $2.6 billion to $6.7 billion. The figure reflects the compensation costs amounting to $756 million, as outlined by the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO).
“The projected expenses for gathering the illegal firearms are estimated to range from $1.6 billion to $7 billion.” “This range estimate increases to between $2.647 billion and $7 billion when compensation costs to owners are factored in,” Mauser stated.
Figures requested by Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs concerning firearms prohibited due to the May 1, 2020 Order In Council reveal that $72 million has been allocated to the firearm “buyback” program, yet not a single firearm has been confiscated to date.
In a recent revelation, Public Safety Canada disclosed that the federal government allocated a staggering $41,094,556, as prompted by an order paper question from Conservative Senator Don Plett last September, yet yielded no tangible outcomes.
An internal memo from late 2019 revealed that the Liberals projected their politically motivated harassment would incur a cost of $1.8 billion.
Enforcement efforts Questioned
By December 2023, estimates from TheGunBlog.ca indicate that the Liberals and RCMP had incurred or were responsible for approximately $30 million in personnel expenses related to the enforcement efforts. The union representing the police service previously stated that the effort to confiscate firearms is a “misdirected effort” aimed at ensuring public safety.
“This action diverts crucial personnel, resources, and funding from tackling the more pressing and escalating issue of criminal use of illegal firearms,” stated the National Police Federation (NPF).
The Canadian Sporting Arms & Ammunition Association (CSAAA), representing firearms retailers, has stated it will have “zero involvement” in the confiscation of these firearms. Even Canada Post held back from providing assistance due to safety concerns.
The consultant previously assessed that retailers are sitting on almost $1 billion worth of inventory that cannot be sold or returned to suppliers because of the Order-In-Council.
“Despite the ongoing confusion surrounding the ban, after four years, we ought to be able to address one crucial question.” Has the prohibition enhanced safety for Canadians? Mauser asks.
Illegally Obtained Firearms are the Problem
Statistics Canada reports a 10% increase in firearm-related violent crime between 2020 and 2022, rising from 12,614 incidents to 13,937 incidents. In that timeframe, the incidence of firearm-related violent crime increased from 33.7 incidents per 100,000 population in 2021 to 36.7 incidents the subsequent year.
“This marks the highest rate documented since the collection of comparable data began in 2009,” the criminologist explains.
Supplementary DataData indicates that firearm homicides have risen since 2020. “The issue lies not with lawfully-held firearms,” Mauser stated.
Firearms that have been banned under the Order-in-Council continue to be securely stored in the safes of their lawful owners. The individuals underwent a thorough vetting process by the RCMP and are subject to nightly monitoring to ensure there are no infractions that could pose a risk to public safety.
“The firearms involved in homicides were seldom legally owned weapons wielded by their rightful owners,” Mauser continues. The number of offenses linked to organized crime has surged from 4,810 in 2016 to a staggering 13,056 in 2020.
“If those in power … aim to diminish crime and enhance public safety, they ought to implement strategies that effectively focus on offenders and utilize our limited tax resources judiciously to reach these objectives,” he stated.
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Google is so closely associated with its key product that its name is a verb that signifies “search.” However, Google’s dominance in that sector is dwindling.
According to eMarketer, Google will lose control of the US search industry for the first time in decades next year.
Google will remain the dominant search player, accounting for 48% of American search advertising revenue. And, remarkably, Google is still increasing its sales in the field, despite being the dominating player in search since the early days of the George W. Bush administration. However, Amazon is growing at a quicker rate.
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding
Amazon will hold over a quarter of US search ad dollars next year, rising to 27% by 2026, while Google will fall even more, according to eMarketer.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the forecast.
Lest you think you’ll have to switch to Bing or Yahoo, this isn’t the end of Google or anything really near.
Google is the fourth-most valued public firm in the world. Its market worth is $2.1 trillion, trailing just Apple, Microsoft, and the AI chip darling Nvidia. It also maintains its dominance in other industries, such as display advertisements, where it dominates alongside Facebook’s parent firm Meta, and video ads on YouTube.
To put those “other” firms in context, each is worth more than Delta Air Lines’ total market value. So, yeah, Google is not going anywhere.
Nonetheless, Google faces numerous dangers to its operations, particularly from antitrust regulators.
On Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Google must open up its Google Play Store to competitors, dealing a significant blow to the firm in its long-running battle with Fortnite creator Epic Games. Google announced that it would appeal the verdict.
In August, a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search. That verdict could lead to the dissolution of the company’s search operation. Another antitrust lawsuit filed last month accuses Google of abusing its dominance in the online advertising business.
Meanwhile, European regulators have compelled Google to follow tough new standards, which have resulted in multiple $1 billion-plus fines.
Pixa Bay
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding
On top of that, the marketplace is becoming more difficult on its own.
TikTok, the fastest-growing social network, is expanding into the search market. And Amazon has accomplished something few other digital titans have done to date: it has established a habit.
When you want to buy anything, you usually go to Amazon, not Google. Amazon then buys adverts to push companies’ products to the top of your search results, increasing sales and earning Amazon a greater portion of the revenue. According to eMarketer, it is expected to generate $27.8 billion in search revenue in the United States next year, trailing only Google’s $62.9 billion total.
And then there’s AI, the technology that (supposedly) will change everything.
Why search in stilted language for “kendall jenner why bad bunny breakup” or “police moving violation driver rights no stop sign” when you can just ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “What’s going on with Kendall Jenner and Bad Bunny?” in “I need help fighting a moving violation involving a stop sign that wasn’t visible.” Google is working on exactly this technology with its Gemini product, but its success is far from guaranteed, especially with Apple collaborating with OpenAI and other businesses rapidly joining the market.
A Google spokeswoman referred to a blog post from last week in which the company unveiled ads in its AI overviews (the AI-generated text that appears at the top of search results). It’s Google’s way of expressing its ability to profit on a changing marketplace while retaining its business, even as its consumers steadily transition to ask-and-answer AI and away from search.
Google has long used a single catchphrase to defend itself against opponents who claim it is a monopoly abusing its power: competition is only a click away. Until recently, that seemed comically obtuse. Really? We are going to switch to Bing? Or Duck Duck Go? Give me a break.
But today, it feels more like reality.
Google is in no danger of disappearing. However, every highly dominating company faces some type of reckoning over time. GE, a Dow mainstay for more than a century, was broken up last year and is now a shell of its previous dominance. Sears declared bankruptcy in 2022 and is virtually out of business. US Steel, long the foundation of American manufacturing, is attempting to sell itself to a Japanese corporation.
SOURCE | CNN
(VOR News) – A ruling that prohibits emergency abortions that contravene the Supreme Court law in the state of Texas, which has one of the most stringent abortion restrictions in the country, has been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. The United States Supreme Court upheld this decision.
The justices did not provide any specifics regarding the underlying reasons for their decision to uphold an order from a lower court that declared hospitals cannot be legally obligated to administer abortions if doing so would violate the law in the state of Texas.
Institutions are not required to perform abortions, as stipulated in the decree. The common populace did not investigate any opposing viewpoints. The decision was made just weeks before a presidential election that brought abortion to the forefront of the political agenda.
This decision follows the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended abortion nationwide.
In response to a request from the administration of Vice President Joe Biden to overturn the lower court’s decision, the justices expressed their disapproval.
The government contends that hospitals are obligated to perform abortions in compliance with federal legislation when the health or life of an expectant patient is in an exceedingly precarious condition.
This is the case in regions where the procedure is prohibited. The difficulty hospitals in Texas and other states are experiencing in determining whether or not routine care could be in violation of stringent state laws that prohibit abortion has resulted in an increase in the number of complaints concerning pregnant women who are experiencing medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms.
The administration cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in a case that bore a striking resemblance to the one that was presented to it in Idaho at the beginning of the year. The justices took a limited decision in that case to allow the continuation of emergency abortions without interruption while a lawsuit was still being heard.
In contrast, Texas has been a vocal proponent of the injunction’s continued enforcement. Texas has argued that its circumstances are distinct from those of Idaho, as the state does have an exemption for situations that pose a significant hazard to the health of an expectant patient.
According to the state, the discrepancy is the result of this exemption. The state of Idaho had a provision that safeguarded a woman’s life when the issue was first broached; however, it did not include protection for her health.
Certified medical practitioners are not obligated to wait until a woman’s life is in imminent peril before they are legally permitted to perform an abortion, as determined by the state supreme court.
The state of Texas highlighted this to the Supreme Court.
Nevertheless, medical professionals have criticized the Texas statute as being perilously ambiguous, and a medical board has declined to provide a list of all the disorders that are eligible for an exception. Furthermore, the statute has been criticized for its hazardous ambiguity.
For an extended period, termination of pregnancies has been a standard procedure in medical treatment for individuals who have been experiencing significant issues. It is implemented in this manner to prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as sepsis, organ failure, and other severe scenarios.
Nevertheless, medical professionals and hospitals in Texas and other states with strict abortion laws have noted that it is uncertain whether or not these terminations could be in violation of abortion prohibitions that include the possibility of a prison sentence. This is the case in regions where abortion prohibitions are exceedingly restrictive.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which resulted in restrictions on the rights of women to have abortions in several Republican-ruled states, the Texas case was revisited in 2022.
As per the orders that were disclosed by the administration of Vice President Joe Biden, hospitals are still required to provide abortions in cases that are classified as dire emergency.
As stipulated in a piece of health care legislation, the majority of hospitals are obligated to provide medical assistance to patients who are experiencing medical distress. This is in accordance with the law.
The state of Texas maintained that hospitals should not be obligated to provide abortions throughout the litigation, as doing so would violate the state’s constitutional prohibition on abortions. In its January judgment, the 5th United States Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with the state and acknowledged that the administration had exceeded its authority.
SOURCE: AP
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