Mission & Justice

P.K. Abdul Ghafour; 6/8/08

A new law abolishing the sponsorship system and streamlining the relationship between employers and their workers will be issued “very soon,” Al-Madinah daily reported yesterday quoting a Shoura Council member. The Shoura member, who requested anonymity, however, pointed out that the new law to be passed by higher authorities would be based on the proposals of the Labor Ministry and not of the National Society of Human Rights (NSHR). “Labor Minister Dr. Ghazi Al-Gosaibi told a Shoura session that his ministry had presented its viewpoints regarding cancelation of the sponsorship rules and that the law would be issued very soon,” the Shoura member said.

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4/7/08

Seventeen women have been taken by police from a luxury hotel in Brussels amid allegations they had been enslaved by an Arab royal family. Police officers and officials from Belgium’s Labour Audit Authority raided the Conrad Hotel, the preferred choice of many national leaders attending European Union summits, on Tuesday. The operation was triggered by the apparent escape of a maid who was among 20 servants working for the widow of a senior royal figure from the United Arab Emirates and her four daughters, who have rented the entire fourth floor of the hotel for the past year. Officials took away 17 people - from countries including the Philippines, Morocco, India, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq and Syria - amid allegations they had been held captive for eight months.

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Md. Rasooldeen; 3/7/08

A Sri Lankan maid committed suicide here six days after her arrival in the Saudi capital, her country’s embassy said yesterday. The woman of the house found Fathima Fazmila, 24, hanging from a noose made by her sari tied to a ceiling fan, according to the embassy. “Ever since she came the maid looked sick and we were trying to make her feel at home since this was the first time she left home,” said Abdulaziz Al-Khereiji, her sponsor. Fazmila, who arrived in the Kingdom on June 14, reportedly told her sponsor that she was recently divorced.

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Nicola Berkovic; 30/6/08

Harsh penalties for employers of 457 visa workers and increased powers for immigration officers are part of a shake-up of Australia’s temporary skilled migration program to be proposed today by the Rudd Government. Immigration Minister Chris Evans said the new laws would help prevent the exploitation of foreign workers and ensure the wages and conditions of Australian workers were not undercut. Senator Evans will today release a discussion paper on proposed reforms to the 457 visa regime, as part of a major review promised in April. Proposed changes include expanded powers for immigration officers to enter and search workplaces to determine whether employers are complying with sponsorship obligations.

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Somini Sengupta; 29/6/08

Hamilton Court is a gated community for the moneyed middle classes. Within its stone walled boundary are a private school, health clinic and fitness club. A small army of security guards patrols its groomed lawns, ensuring the outside world does not intrude. It is just one of the exclusive enclaves that have blossomed across India in recent years, emerging on the outskirts of prospering cities. They allow residents to buy their way out of the hardships that afflict vast multitudes in this country of more than 1 billion. The 25-storey Hamilton Court in Gurgaon, a satellite city on the southern outskirts of Delhi, offers what the Government cannot - 24-hour electricity, running water and protection from law breakers.

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Marie Magleby; 28/6/08

Since she came to the UAE in 2006, Rose has been picking up the pieces of her shattered hopes. Now, eight bosses later, she keeps hoping her day will arrive. Rose arrived in the UAE with a visit visa after years of working in the Philippines and Saudi Arabia. She could have signed on with an agency in the Philippines to guarantee a job, but she had already been through a series of unfortunate events and preferred to take no risks. She wanted to meet her sponsor before signing. She refers to most of her employers as bosses, not sponsors, because only one of them sponsored an employment visa for her. The others sent her to Kish Island, Iran, every couple of months to return as a visitor, or the employment didn’t last long enough to worry about it.

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Joseph A. Kechichian; 26/6/08

…The Country Reports on Human Rights Practices preceded these publications, going back to the early 1970s, when President Jimmy Carter elevated human rights concerns to the policy level.  In all of these reports, including the ones that displayed blatant misinformation, an effort was made to let facts speak for themselves. Starting in the late 1990s, a slew of new areas of concern emerged, including religion - with the Annual Report on International Religious Freedom -and now human trafficking. The June 2008 Trafficking in Persons Report, a 295 pages document available at http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2008/, is in its eight edition and seeks to address a deadly serious issue. Human trafficking means the actual trade in persons, which is akin to modern-day slavery, as its victims are clearly forced into labour or sexual exploitation. The detailed report estimates that approximately 600,000 to 800,000 individuals are made to involuntarily cross national borders to satisfy criminal gangs each year.To be sure, trafficking in people is wrong, and using physical force is neither pleasant nor victimless. Whenever someone is enslaved - readers are encouraged to consult the original to better understand heart-breaking cases - we all lose part of our humanity.

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26/6/08

Amid rising prices of food and other basic needs, Catholic women in a northern parish are working hard in quarries to support their children. Five state-run and private companies are mining white rock from hills around a large lake supplying water to Thac Ba Hydroelectric Plant. Those quarries, in Yen Bai province’s Mong Son village, 220 kilometers north of Ha Noi, employ women from Mong Son and other local villages to load rocks for shipment. About 2,500 of Mong Son’s 3,000 residents are Catholics. They form half the membership of the parish based in the village, which covers an area that is home to 150,000 people. One day in June, in 38-degree-Celsius heat under a scorching sun, hundreds of women workers were handing heavy white rocks down a line to one another for loading onto trucks and boats. “We know that carrying rocks is hard physical labor that can damage our health, but we must do it to support our families, because there are no other jobs here,” Maria Dinh Thi Lien told UCA News as she wiped the sweat from her face.

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Mary-Anne Toy; 21/6/08

Bill Zhang, a school teacher who became a dissident after being swept up in the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests, killed himself last Saturday night. He threw himself off the sixth or seventh floor of a friend’s housing estate in the southern province of Guangdong because he had lost the will to keep fighting to return to Australia. Mr Zhang (not his real name) lived in Sydney for eight years, driving a bottle recycling truck in Botany, while he kept applying for a protection visa. He was refused six times - the refugee tribunal doubted his story - and ended up in Villawood detention centre before being deported last year.

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Paola Totaro; 21/6/08

We met Annie not long after moving into our new home in London. She came recommended via word-of-mouth as so many migrant domestic workers do. On day one, she arrived early and I found her waiting politely outside on the street ready to start work when the clock struck 9am.We had a cup of tea together before she began work and despite palpable shyness - had nobody asked her to talk about herself before? - she said she’d come to London in 2002 and had worked six days a week ever since as a cleaner, a housekeeper, an all-round helper with a number of families to maximise her earnings.

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