This story discusses graphic details of slavery, sexual abuse and violence

Pacific children as young as six are being adopted overseas and being made to work as house slaves, suffering threats, beatings and rape.

Kris Teikamata — a social worker at a community agency — spoke about the harrowing cases she encountered in her work, from 2019 to 2024, with children who had escaped their abusers in Auckland and Wellington.

“They’re incredibly traumatised because it’s years and years and years of physical abuse, physical labour and and a lot of the time, sexual abuse, either by the siblings or other family members,” she said.

“They were definitely threatened, they were definitely coerced and they had no freedom.

“When I met each girl, [by then] 17, 18, 19 years old, it was like meeting a 50-year-old. The light had gone out of their eyes. They were just really withdrawn and shut down.”

In one case a church minister raped his adopted daughter and got her pregnant.

Teikamata and her team helped 10 Samoan teenagers who had managed to escape their homes, and slavery — two boys and eight girls — with health, housing and counselling. She fears they are the tip of the iceberg, and that many remain under lock and key.

“They were brought over as a child or a teenager, sometimes they knew the family in Samoa, sometimes they didn’t — they had promised them a better life over here, an education and citizenship.

“When they arrived they would generally always be put into slavery. They would have to get up at 5, 6 in the morning, start cleaning, start breakfast, do the washing, then go to school and then after school again do cleaning and dinner and the chores — and do that everyday until a certain age, until they were workable.

“Then they were sent out to factories in Auckland or Wellington and their bank account was taken away from them and their Eftpos card. They were given $20 a week.

“From the age of 16 they were put to work. And they were also not allowed to have a phone — most of them had no contact with family back in Samoa.”

‘A thousand kids a year… and it’s still going on’
Nothing stopped the abusive families from being able to adopt again and they did, she said.

A recent briefing to ministers reiterated that New Zealanders with criminal histories or significant child welfare records have used overseas courts to approve adoptions, which were recognised under New Zealand law without further checks.

“When I delved more into it, I just found out that it was a very easy process to adopt from Samoa,” she said.

“There’s no checks, it’s a very easy process. So about a thousand kids [a year] are today being adopted from Samoa. It’s such a high number — whereas other countries have checks or very robust systems. And it’s still going on.”

As children, they could not play with friends and all of their movements were controlled.

Oranga Tamariki uplifted younger children, who were sometimes siblings of older children who had escaped.

“The ones that I met had escaped and found a friend or were homeless or had reached out to the police.”

Loving families
When they were reunited with their birth parents on video calls, it was clear they came from loving families who had been deceived, she said.

While some adoptive parents faced court for assault, only one has been prosecuted for trafficking.

Government, police and Oranga Tamariki were aware and in talks with the Samoan government, she said.

Adoption Action member and researcher Anne Else said several opportunities to overhaul the 70-year-old Adoption Act had been thwarted, and the whole legislation needed ripping up.

“The entire law needs to be redone, it dates back to 1955 for goodness sake,” she said.

“But there’s a big difference between understanding how badly and urgently the law needs changing and actually getting it done.

“Oranga Tamariki are trying, I know, to work with for example Tonga to try and make sure that their law is a bit more conformant with ours, and ensure there are more checks done to avoid these exploitative cases.”

Sold for adoption
Children from other countries had been sold for adoption, she said, and the adoption rules depended on which country they came from. Even the Hague Convention, which is supposed to provide safeguards between countries, was no guarantee.

Immigration minister Erica Stanford said other ministers were looking at what could be done to crack down on trafficking through international adoption.

“If there are non-genuine adoptions and and potential trafficking, we need to get on top of that,” she sad.

“It falls outside of the legislation that I am responsible for, but there are other ministers who have it on their radars because we’re all worried about it. I’ve read a recent report on it and it was pretty horrifying. So it is being looked at.”

A meeting was held between New Zealand and Samoan authorities in March. A summary of discussions said it focused on aligning policies, information sharing, and “culturally grounded frameworks” that uphold the rights, identity, and wellbeing of children, following earlier work in 2018 and 2021.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

New Zealand Labour MP Louisa Wall has accused China of harvesting organs from political prisoners among the Uyghur and Falun Gong populations.

The MP, who is part of a global network of politicians monitoring the actions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), also says her own government needs to do more to counter what she calls the slave labour trade in China.

“Forced organ harvesting is occurring to service a global market where people are wanting hearts, lungs, eyes, skin,” Wall said.

China expert Professor Anne-Marie Brady of the University of Canterbury, describes the New Zealand government’s political strategy on China as something close to a cone of silence.

“Our MPs seem to have a pact that they’re not allowed to say anything at all critical of the CCP and barely mention the word China in any kind of negative terms.”

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta refused to do interviews for the new Red Line podcast, which examines the influence of the CCP in New Zealand.

But Wall has broken ranks.

‘Used as slaves’
“I’m concerned that there appears to be a million Uyghurs being imprisoned in what they call education camps, but essentially, used as slaves to pick cotton.”

Wall, along with National’s Simon O’Connor, is one of two New Zealand MPs in the International Parliamentary Alliance on China, a network of more than 200 politicians from 20 parliaments, set up to monitor the actions of the CCP.

She thinks New Zealand should be doing much more to counter the slave labour trade from Xinjiang, in the north west of China.

“What the UK and Canada have done is they’ve got modern slavery acts and they want to ensure the corporates who are taking those raw materials, actually ensure that the production of those raw materials complies with the modern slavery act. I like that mechanism.”

She says the government also needs to pass new laws to stop New Zealanders getting organ transplants sourced from China or from any country that cannot verify the integrity of its organ donor programme.

China sources some organs from political prisoners, she said.

“The Uyghur population, and also the Falun Gong population, both have been designated as prisoners of conscience,” she said. “We know that they are slaves. We also know that they’re being used to harvest organs.”

Tribunal finding
She bases that on findings from a recent independent tribunal chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, a British QC, who previously worked with the International Criminal Court (ICC).

His 600-page report, called the China Tribunal, says the killing of political prisoners for organ transplants is continuing in China and that many people have died “indescribably hideous deaths” in the process.

“Based on a report from Lord Justice Nice from the UK, we now know that forced organ harvesting is occurring to service a global market where people are wanting hearts, lungs, eyes, skin,” Wall said.

The Chinese embassy in New Zealand ignored requests to talk about this issue.

China announced back in 2014 that it would no longer remove organs from executed prisoners and when the China Tribunal report was released in 2018 the CCP dismissed it as inaccurate and politically motivated.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A new report has found that tuna fishing companies in the Pacific are doing little to stop slavery on their boats.

The canned tuna industry is rife with allegations of modern slavery in its Pacific supply chains, with little protection for workers from forced labour.

The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre report, All At Sea: Modern slavery in Pacific supply chains of canned tuna, surveyed dozens of the world’s largest canned tuna brands.

While more than four in five of them have public commitments on workers’ human rights, this doesn’t translate into efforts to end slavery in their supply chains.

The covid-19 pandemic has also heightened the risk for workers of experiencing modern slavery.

New Zealand and other countries have been urged by the centre to legislate against products made using forced labour.

“Too many Pacific tuna fishermen that put food on our tables face abuse and confinement every day,” said Phil Bloomer, the executive director of the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre.

Failing to provide duty of care
“Put simply, the brands who put the cans on their shelves are failing to provide adequate duty of care to these workers who furnish their products.”

According to Bloomer, when the centre first approached these brands two years ago, many had made paper promises to improve their approach to human rights.

“Yet, two years on, the laggard companies have done next to nothing.

“This is not inevitable. A handful of companies – Tesco, Thai Union and Woolworths (Australia) – have shown it is both commercially viable and a moral imperative to emancipate workers caught in modern slavery.”

Only six companies of the original 35 surveyed by the centre have revised their human rights due diligence processes over the last two years: Ahold Delhaize, Coles, Conga Foods, Kaufland, REWE Group and Woolworths.

Bloomer said other brands must catch up and take urgent action to protect workers.

“Investors should also note that the laggards not only run major reputation risk, but also imminent legal risk as new laws in 2021 will leave their negligence exposed to legal challenge.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz