Thailand's Despicable Trafficking Record

Most of the trafficking in Thailand involves sex workers. But two important pieces of journalism in the past year have cast light on brutal and abhorrent practices of human trafficking in the largely unregulated fishing industry. Reuters won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for a series of articles calling attention to the role of the Thai navy in abetting the smuggling of Rohingya Muslims fleeing persecution and economic deprivation in Burma. Many of the Rohingya either died at sea or were sold to human traffickers and into slavery. The Guardian recently published an investigation that showed that slaves are forced to work for no pay for years at a time under threat of extreme violence in the production of seafood sold by major retailers in the United States and Europe. It reported that large numbers of men, bought and sold like animals and held against their will on fishing boats off Thailand, are integral to shrimp production.