BANGKOK — A plan by the Thai government to put prisoners to work on the country's understaffed fishing boats has been scrapped, the Foreign Ministry said Tuesday following charges that the scheme threatened inmates' rights.
The ministry said in statement today that the plan had been withdrawn, adding that it was an "exploratory idea" and part of a government policy to help prisoners reintegrate into society.
In December the country's Labour Ministry said it would send consenting prisoners with less than a year left of their sentences to work on fishing boats to ease a worker shortage and combat human trafficking fuelled by that shortage.
Rights groups had argued the plan would fail to address the fundamental causes of the labour shortage that fuels human trafficking in Thailand's 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 migrant workers from neighbouring countries who are often subject to ill-treatment. Thailand is ranked one of the world's worst centres of human trafficking.