By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Sep 2 (IPS) – The ordeal of a Sri Lankan domestic worker whose Saudi Arabian employer allegedly drove nails and metal wires into her body has sent alarm bells ringing among government officials and activists, but how such abuses can be stopped remain far from clear.
“This is a bit of a problem. Maybe we need to look at
some new protective measures,” said Mangala Randeniya,
deputy general manager at the state-owned Sri Lanka Bureau
of Foreign Employment (SLBFE), which looks after the
overseas deployment of this South Asian island nation’s
workers.
The widely reported case of 50-year-old L P D Ariyawathi,
who returned to Sri Lanka on Aug. 21 with 20 nails and metal
wires in her body, has triggered protests outside the Saudi
Arabian embassy here.
After President Mahinda Rajapaksa ordered a full
investigation into the Ariyawathi case, SLBFE officials flew
to Riyadh on Aug. 30 to persuade Saudi authorities to take
action against the employer and discuss issues facing
migrant workers.
This latest case may be the most bizarre thus far, but it
is not the first and will not be last, given that this South
Asian island nation has 1.5 million overseas workers, of
whom 1.2 million work in Saudi Arabia. Majority of them are
women working in private homes as domestic workers.
But Lakshan Dias, a lawyer who is chairman of the Colombo-
based South Asian Network for Refugees, IDPs and Migrant
Workers, says Ariyawathi’s plight provides a opportunity for
the Sri Lankan government to step up pressure on labour-
receiving countries to fulfill international conventions
against torture and others respecting the rights of migrant
workers.
Saudi Arabia has signed the International Labour
Organisation (ILO) Convention against Torture but with some
reservations, he says.
“Putting pressure on governments won’t necessarily mean
we will lose markets,” he said, arguing that recently the
SLBFE banned the deployment of Sri Lankan domestic workers
in Jordan because agents there were paying less than the
prescribed minimum wage of 200 U.S. dollars per month.
But while Sri Lanka has bilateral agreements on migrant
labour with Kuwait and Jordan, it does not have one with
Saudi Arabia.
Likewise, Sri Lanka, like many other labour-exporting
countries, has signed the 1990 International Convention on
the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and
Their Families. But many labour-receiving nations, like
Saudi Arabia, have not signed it.
With little certainty over how justice can be obtained in
Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka’s bureau of foreign employment has
taken the responsibility of compensating Ariyawathi with a
house and cash. It says it plans to fly her to Saudi Arabia
in case her presence is required for an investigation there.
Nimalka Fernando, a women’s rights activist and
spokeswoman for the Colombo-based Women’s Alliance for Peace
and Democracy, says the government drags its feet over the
protection of domestic workers, which the country has been
exporting for three decades.
“Sri Lankan domestic workers are getting harassed almost
daily in some part of the world but our officials are slow
in responding,” she said. “It was horrifying that the
Foreign Minister G L Peiris met the Saudi ambassador in
Colombo to register a complaint in the Ariyawathi case only
on Tuesday (Aug. 31), almost 10 days after the victim
returned and the storywas splashed all over the newspapers.”
She said rights groups plan to file a complaint with the
U.N. Expert Group on Migrant Workers in Geneva on the
torture of Ariyawathi. “We are also canvassing for all
labour- receiving countries where Sri Lankans work to ratify
the ILO Convention Against Torture and enforce it,” she
added.
But Dias says that what happens to efforts to seek legal
address in Saudi Arabia, where this is first case of abuse
of this kind for Sri Lanka, is up in the air. If the courts
move and issue a ruling in favour of the migrant worker, it
could be precedent case for the future.
He adds that judicial intervention – getting a ruling and
policy from the courts – might be more effective than
working through existing laws.
For instance, Dias has filed a fundamental rights
petition in Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court on behalf of a Sri
Lankan worker who was duped into signing a second contract
with a job agent, one where the job designation was changed
from the original contract and the salary reduced. This
worker returned to Sri Lanka a few months after arriving in
Qatar, where he had been forced to work as a labourer
although he was a skilled plumber, and then fell ill.
The victim is demanding not only compensation but a
ruling from the court that the government should have a
compensation formula for all workers in distress.
Ariyawathi’s case has drawn as much attention as much as
what happened to Rizana Nafeek, the underage domestic worker
who was trafficked into Saudi Arabia and sentenced to death
on Jun. 16, 2007 for the alleged murder of an infant in her
care. In jail since May 2005, Nafeek’s sentence has been
suspended in view of an appeal.
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