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JAKARTA: Saudi Arabian families are abusing female migrant workers
to the point of slavery, and Riyadh needs to respond with sweeping
labor and justice reforms, a major rights group said Tuesday.
US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a new
report released in Indonesia that many Saudis believed they
“owned” their foreign domestic workers and treated them like
slaves.
“Saudis treat them like chattel, slaves, like
cattle. A domestic worker is like a slave, and slaves have no
rights,” the report quoted a “senior consular official” with a
foreign embassy in the kingdom as saying.
The 133-page report entitled “As If I Am Not
Human:” Abuses against Asian Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia, was
compiled after two years of research, the group said.
The work included 42 interviews with domestic
workers, officials, and labor recruiters in Saudi Arabia and the
workers’ countries of origin, it said.
Out of 86 domestic workers interviewed, Human
Rights Watch concluded that 36 faced abuse that amounted to forced
labor, trafficking or slavery-like conditions.
Some of the cases were horrific.
“For one year and five months . . . no salary
at all. I asked for money, and they would beat me, or cut me with a
knife, or burn me,” Sri Lankan domestic worker Ponnamma S. was
quoted as telling the rights group.
Haima G., a Filipino domestic worker, said her
employer called her into his bedroom one day soon after she had
arrived and told her she had been “bought” for 10,000 riyals
($2,670).
“The employer raped me many times. I told
everything to madam. The whole family, madam, the employer, they
didn’t want me to go. They locked the doors and gates,” she was
quoted as saying.
Nour Miyati, an Indonesian domestic worker, had
her fingers and toes amputated due to daily beatings and starvation.
Charges against her employers were dropped after a three-year legal
process, despite a confession.
“Employers often take away passports and lock
workers in the home, increasing their isolation and risk of
psychological, physical, and sexual abuse,” Human Rights Watch
said in a statement.
It said Saudi labor laws excluded domestic
workers, so many were forced to work 18 hours a day, seven days a
week—often without pay—for years. Sleeping quarters included
closets and bathrooms.
Nisha Varia, Human Rights Watch’s senior
women’s rights researcher, said that in the worst cases the women
were “treated like virtual slaves.”
The kingdom’s kafala or sponsorship system
gave employers control over the workers’ visas, meaning they could
refuse to allow domestic staff to change jobs or leave the country.
Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Nepal
accounted for the bulk of the women, thousands of whom sought
shelter each year at the Saudi social affairs ministry or at their
respective embassies.
Varia said conditions in the Sri Lankan and
Indonesian shelters were “horrific.”
“I was shocked—you have 200 women in a room
that should be for maybe 50 people at the maximum,” she told a
press conference.
Few of the abusers were ever brought to justice
as migrant women who dared to complain risked counter-charges of
adultery, witchcraft or moral degradation, punishable by up to 10
years’ imprisonment and 490 lashes.
The government has spent years considering labor
reform “without taking any action,” Varia said.
“It’s now time to make these changes, which
include covering domestic workers under the 2005 Labor Law and
changing the kafala system so that workers’ visas are no longer
tied to their employers,” she said.
“The Saudi government should extend Labor Law
protections to domestic workers and reform the visa sponsorship
system so that women desperate to earn money for their families
don’t have to gamble with their lives.”
More than eight million migrants work in Saudi
Arabia, including 1.5 million domestic workers, most of whom send
money back home to their families.
-- AFP
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