TAIWAN

Radio Interview

March 26, 2004

TAIWAN: Online auctions the new frontier for human trafficking

It's been billed as the world's biggest marketplace...eBay, where if you're on-line, all you need is a credit-card and you can buy almost anything. But there are questions now about the merits of trading this way....after eBay was forced to halt an auction and pull details from its site, when it emerged that the goods for sale were in fact alive and human.

Listen | Audio Help

Presenter/Interviewer: Marion MacGregor
Speakers: Hani Durzy, eBay spokesman; Hung Nguyen, president, the Congress of Vietnamese Americans in Vancouver; Graceia Lai, the Taipei Women's Rescue Foundation

DURZY: There is no buying and selling of humans on eBay that goes on, it's against our policies. If it's a listing that purports to be selling a human or trafficking humans, we take the listing down immediately.

MACGREGOR: Hani Durzy, spokesman for eBay in San Jose. Company policy it may be, but just a few weeks ago, the eBay Taiwan site carried an ad to auction three Vietnamese females, two of them apparently in their early teens. The starting price bid was around seven thousand Australian or 180,000 Taiwanese dollars.

MACGREGOR: And this is the man behind the attempted auction.. Mr Lew, in a translated telephone conversation with a member of a Vietnamese human rights group posing as a potential customer.

eBay stopped the auction and suspended Mr Lew, after they were contacted by a number of Vietnamese activist groups in Australia and the United States. The president of the Congress of Vietnamese Americans in Vancouver, Hung Nguyen says the anonymous selling of women and girls online adds a new dimension to an old problem.

NGUYEN: Human trafficking of women and children is a widespread interest. This is the first time that we've found it on eBay but this does not mean that this is not happening all the time, and if you also look at the listing, it basically only said ship to Taiwan and women...there's nothing that's saying "we're selling human persons".

MACGREGOR: With forty-two million registered users and as many as ten million items up for auction at any one time, eBay is the world's biggest market - and the opportunities for buying and selling anything, including people, are theoretically endless. But while the traffickers may be moving to new media, some things haven't changed. Asia, particularly Vietnam and Taiwan, are still the best places to find a bargain.

NGUYEN: Because they're economically depressed and impoverished and so alot of these individuals wish to have an opportunity for a better livelihood. Sometimes they do not know that they're going into a negative situation. What normally occurs is someone may say I'm looking for a bride, and so they would purchase a bride or they would pay the family some money for that women and bring them to another country. And when they bring them to another country what happens is that the quote-unquote husband puts that woman into a life of prostitution or to work at a brothel. This industry is actually supported by your average citizen, meaning a lot of folks who go to Southeast Asia go thereon sex tours

MACGREGOR: Is there anything worse about this kind of online auction?

NGUYEN: The worst part is that they sometimes deal with children, it's one thing for us to be dealing with consenting adults who know specifically the life that they're going into versus people who are under sixteen and eighteen years of age into these situations now those are...it's a modern form of slavery.

MACGREGOR: And it's creating new challenges for human rights groups trying to put a stop to the human trafficking industry. Graceia Lai from the Taipei Women's Rescue Foundation, says Mr Lew is arguing he's done nothing wrong...and the authorities are buying it.

LAI: Three days after the information, we filed a law suit against eBay and Mr Lew for alleged human trafficking. Later on the CIB questioned the rule and they qualified that the man was not involved in human trafficking...because according to Mr Lew, the bakery owner said he was happily married to a Vietnamese woman, and he merely wanted to introduce his wife's friends to Taiwan men by putting their photos on eBay, that's it.

MACGREGOR: What should eBay do?

LAI: eBay should ban this marriage service for auction on their website.

MACGREGOR: Despite the threat of legal action, it seems as far as eBay's concerned, that's the end of the story. Spokesman Hani Durzy says the company has no plans to vet items before they are put up onto the site.

DURZY: Listings are coming in from all over the world, we have no control over a listing before it actually goes up on the site and frankly our community wouldn't want that, the system wouldn'twork that way. Our system actaully works quite well at identifying listings that violate policies . We would never allow one of these sales regardless of whether it's a hoax or not to go through.

MACGREGOR: But you couldn't guarantee that there may be a case where this slips through and there are people, or organs, corpses even, that are sold on your site

DURZY: I can tell you that as far as we know there has never been a case of something like that where a transaction has actually gone through.

(http://www.abc.net.au/ra/asiapac/programs/s1074951.htm)