Ten people have been indicted for their alleged involvement in a scheme in which foreign students were tricked into coming to Taiwan before being forced to work as cheap labor for local factories, according to the Taiwan Changhua District Prosecutors Office on Friday.
In January, The Reporter, a Taipei-based independent news outlet, ran a story on 16 Ugandan students enrolled at Chung Chou University of Science and Technology (CCUT) in Changhua County in 2019, who were sent to factories to work as “interns” for long hours with low pay.
The report said the students could not refuse to work because they had run up huge tuition fee debts owed to the school.
According to a statement issued by the prosecutors office, three defendants, Lan (藍), Chai (柴) and Lin (林), are accused of falsely claiming to provide high-value scholarships and high-tech industry internships, deceiving 16 Ugandan students into studying at CCUT in November 2019.
Chai was reportedly CCUT’s dean of student affairs at that time.
The students were then made to do labor-intensive work in factories in Miaoli County through a manpower agency broker surnamed Chen (陳) to pay off NT$100,700 (US$3,157.90) in travel expenses and over NT$60,000 in tuition and miscellaneous school fees per semester.
In August, Tu Jung-hui (涂榮輝), deputy head of Miaoli County’s Labor and Youth Development Department, and two of the department’s staff members, including one surnamed Liao (廖), were detained after a search of the department by personnel from the prosecutors office and the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau’s Taichung Office.
The Labor and Youth Development Department was suspected of helping to cover up the manpower agency’s repeated labor violations by not issuing fines.
The prosecutors office said that in order to protect the factories that employed the Ugandan students from being investigated, Chen entrusted an intermediary surnamed Hsu (徐) to wine and dine Liao, breaching the ethics and duties of a civil servant.
In addition, another defendant from CCUT, surnamed Lee (李), and a former National Immigration Agency (NIA) deputy captain, who ran a NIA shelter in Nantou County, were both charged.
Lee had requested the then-deputy captain, surnamed Liu (劉), to provide the whereabouts of a Ugandan student.
The incident is regarded as an unlawful disclosure of privacy, according to the prosecutors office.
The 10 defendants were charged with various crimes, such as violating human trafficking laws, committing corruption, breaching the personal information protection law, and falsifying documents by public servants, the prosecutor’s office said.
Furthermore, prosecutors have applied to the court to confiscate over NT$2.448 million related to the student scheme which were obtained by Chai, Lan, Lin and Chen.
According to Collines Mugisha, one of the 16 Ugandan students who came to Taiwan in 2019 to study at CCUT, he used to work over 10 hours a day until he transferred to Providence University in Taichung last year.
Mugisha, who originally hoped to study intelligent automation engineering, said he had worked as a computer numerical control (CNC) machine operator and a construction site worker, as well as a logistics company worker, for about two years while at CCUT.
Even at school, he could barely understand anything that was taught in class because all courses were mainly taught in Chinese, Mugisha added.
“I was tortured both physically and psychologically,” said Mugisha, adding he was “very disappointed” that he was unable to receive the quality education that CCUT staff who traveled to Uganda to recruit students had promised.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel