A global coalition of human rights organizations and labor groups has issued a letter to US Secretary of State John Kerry calling on the US Department of State to downgrade Thailand to Tier 3 in the 2014 Global Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report because it is not meeting minimum standards to combat human trafficking, particularly among migrant workers and Rohingya Muslim refugees. Tier 3 in the TIP Report indicates that a government is not making significant efforts to combat human trafficking and opens up the possibility of sanctions.

In the 2013 report, Thailand was ranked just above Tier 3, on the Tier 2 Watch List, because of the Thai Government’s failure to “adequately regulate brokers, reduce the high costs associated with registration, or allow registered migrants to change employers.” The 2013 TIP Report review of Thailand also cited “pervasive trafficking-related corruption and weak interagency coordination” that “continued to impede progress in combating trafficking” in its assessment of the Government’s efforts to combat human trafficking. The letter provided examples of how the Thai Government has failed to address these issues in the course of the last year, and argued that Thai officials continue to be at best complacent, at worst complicit, in the trafficking of migrant workers from neighboring countries to provide inexpensive labor for export industries.