Taiwan police order Vietnamese women on 'marriage tour' to leave
TAIPEI : Police have ordered four Vietnamese women to leave Taiwan after a match-making agency paraded them across the island in a tour to marry them off for thousands of dollars, a police officer said on Saturday. The women had violated immigration laws and been given until Wednesday to leave Taiwan, a police officer on Penghu island told AFP. The agency was also being investigated for trade in humans.
Penghu has the island's highest rate of marriage between Taiwanese and foreigners and was one of the stops in the women's tour, reports said. "These women applied for tourist visas and it's against the immigration regulations for them to engage in activities other than sight-seeing," the police officer said. "It's also against the law if match-makers were peddling these women like commodities," he told AFP.
Local newspapers have reported that a marriage agency based in central Chiayi county had been "parading" the women across the island in a search of Taiwanese husbands. The agency reportedly presented them to a packed crowd outside a temple in Chiayi saying they were available for marriage for a fee of 300,000 Taiwan dollars (about US$9,000). The women were later shown off at a temple on Penghu, the reports said. Two Taiwanese men had reportedly shown interest in taking the Vietnamese as brides but changed their minds after learning the women were ordered to leave.
Police are investigating if the match-making agency was involved in trade in humans, a crime punishable by a minimum five-year prison sentence and a fine of up to 500,000 Taiwanese dollars. Some 300,000 men in Taiwan are married to foreign women, nearly half of whom are from mainland China with most of the others from Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand.
Agence France Presse - November 06, 2004
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