Roundup: Thailand's Tier-3 trafficking status irrelevant to political factor: premier

The sustained relegation of Thailand on the United States' list of reported human trafficking countries had nothing to do with the Southeast Asian state being currently run by a non-elected government, said Thai leader Prayut Chan-o-cha on Wednesday.

The non-elected Thai premier said the political factor did by no means affect the sustained ranking of Thailand at Tier 3 on the U.S. government's Trafficking In Persons list and pledged to continue to combat human trafficking rackets anywhere in the country to avoid such lowest rankings in the future.

"As Thailand has been kept at Tier 3, some people quickly blamed me and my government for not being an elected one. But what had a previous elected government ever done to avoid the Tier 3 relegation at all? The problems had been unresolved until the time of the current government."

"What have several other countries done to get above the Tier-3 ranking, compared to Thailand which had already taken legal action against nearly 100 suspected human traffickers?"

"Let's accept the fact that we were wrong. There were rules about human traffickings by which we had earlier failed to abide. We were punished because we had not corrected our mistakes," commented the Thai leader.

Prayut pledged to continue to fight human traffickings following arrests of nearly 100 suspected traffickers allegedly preying on Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants in southern Thailand bordering Malaysia.

Arrested among the suspects was an army lieutenant general, alleged of directing the illegal business in exchange for money extorted from the job- and asylum-seeking migrants as well as cheap-labor employers in a third country.

In addition, Thailand had been blamed by the European Union for reported failures to fight illegal unreported and unregulated fishing in its Gulf of Thailand and Andaman Sea.

Employment of under-aged labor and illegal migrants aboard Thai fishing boats had been reported and prompted the EU to threaten to impose an embargo on Thai marine products to the European states.

Thailand has exported an estimated 500 million U.S. dollars in frozen seafoods to the European states in a year.

Meanwhile, the premier commented that Thailand has not as yet joined the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) for fears that pressure may have mounted up on this country to abide by the international rules governing intellectual copyrights and pharmaceutical patents, especially those registered in the United States.

Prayut said Thailand had decided to put off the TPP membership because, he said, the Thai people's sustained interests might have been otherwise compromised.

"Being a TPP member might have otherwise compelled us to forego varied public interests such as those involving pharmaceutical patents," he said. Endi