A Year of Human Rights Covenants: Great Leap for Taiwan
National Human Rights Commission, Taiwan
covered labor market control, migrant workers in
social welfare and public long-term care system,
supply chain responsibility, and the sustainable
development of global economy and trade. In
addition to the experts and scholars in different
areas and government officials, participants also
included NGOs, people from different sectors
and trades, students, and media workers.
Due to the overwhelming response to the
forum, registrants before the deadline already
outnumbered the designated vacancies. On
the forum date, all 120 seats were filled, and
over half of them still stayed with the event in
the afternoon to exchange opinions with online
participants. As the policy on the human rights
of migrant workers is also an important issue
in international development, officials from the
representative offices of Indonesia, Thailand, the
Philippines, the US, and New Zealand also joined
the forum for gathering information.
The human rights of migrant workers have been
one of our main concerns since the NHRC was
established, and many incumbent members of
the NHRC are experts in this area. The issue of
migrant workers was one of the six prioritized
concerns in the annual strategic planning of
2022. For a better understanding of migrant
workers’ social circumstances in Taiwan, we
spent one whole year on studying and analyzing
their situations in production and social welfare
sectors from the angle of international human
rights conventions through collaboration with
Associate Professor Lin Jia-he, College of Law,
National Chengchi University, and Associate
Professor Liuhuang Li-chuan, Department
of Labor Relations, National Chung Cheng
University. We also invited scholars, international
experts, representatives of civilian groups, and
representatives of relevant government agencies
to discuss human rights protection for migrant
workers in Taiwan in the forum.
Confined by the long-standing notion that
migrant workers are supplementary labor,
the government simply imposes controls and
restrictions on the related labor markets and
overlooks the basic personal needs of migrant
workers. As a result, the society does not actually
understand their working conditions and their
▋ Participants at the 2022 Forum on Migrant Workers’ Human Rights in Taiwan.
National Human Rights Commission 2022 Annual Report
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