We recently had a new person come to the shelter who had his had completely severed in an accident at work. Things are very complicated for him right now as this accident occurred while he was "illegally" employed. I put that term in quotes because in many of the cases where laborers work oustide of their contracts, they are only doing so to escape abusive and exploitative conditions, or because their contracts were not met in the first place. This individual now has no way of paying his medical expenses as he had no insurance under that employer.

When the police discovered his situation, they were immediately ready to repatriate him and they were going to do this without investigating the facts of the accident and attempting to get him compensation of any kind. It seems that to the law enforcement authorities here, laborers are a real burden and any kind of help or service they provide to migrant workers is meant as a favor to them. In the time between his initial surgery and time under police custody, he was supposed to take great care of his hand and his bandages needed to be replaced every eight hours. The police completely ignored this fact and his hand was left without proper care for two days. It then became severely infected, and now it seems that parts of tissue will have to be removed and it isn't a guarantee that he will have any use of that hand in the future. If the police even cared to take him to the hospital this situation would not have occurred.

When the police eventually took him to our office, they had every intention of just leaving him here so that they wouldn't have to take responsibility for him. They didn't want to trouble themselves with the case. But as our office found out the unethical and negligent abuse by the police, we are now fighting with them to investigate the case. It's all very complicated, but the people at the office are doing everything in their power to see that this individual is given the basic rights of medical care and an investigation into the specifics of the accident. The police had no intention of carrying out these things, and this is just another example of the unfair and unethical treatment of migrant workers in Taiwan.