Thailand withdraws plan to put inmates on fishing boats

A radical plan by the Thai government to put prisoners to work on the country's under-staffed fishing boats has been scrapped, the foreign ministry said yesterday, following charges the scheme threatened inmates' rights.

Rights groups said the idea would fail to address the fundamental causes of the labour shortage that fuels human trafficking in the fishing industry.

Thailand is the world's third-largest seafood exporter and its fishing industry employs more than 300,000 people, many of them illegal migrants from neighbouring countries who are often subject to ill-treatment.

Critics say the conditions amount to slavery. Some workers end up on the boats after paying human smugglers to transport them to Thailand for work. But once in Thai waters, the migrants, many from Myanmar, are simply sold to fishing boat captains and held against their will. Last month the country's Labour Ministry said it would send consenting prisoners who had less than a year left of their sentence to work on boats to ease a labour shortage in the fishing sector and to combat human trafficking fuelled by the shortage.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday the plan had been withdrawn, adding it was an "exploratory idea" and part of a government policy to help prisoners reintegrate into society.