The Hindu Business Line : Keralites among abused workers in S. Arabia: Human Rights Watch

MIGRANT workers from Kerala are among foreign workers who are languishing in Saudi Arabia after being subject to "pervasive abuses", according to a report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The report, titled `Bad dreams: Exploitation and abuse of migrant workers in Saudi Arabia', released on July 15, said that foreign workers, who comprise one-third of the kingdom's population, face torture, forced confessions and unfair trials when they are accused of crimes.

The Thiruvananthapuram-based Confederation of Human Rights Organisations of Kerala provided inputs to the HRW, which found the victimised persons to include skilled and unskilled workers, young adults travelling outside their home countries for the first time; and married men, and single and divorced women with children to support.

The report offers a rare glimpse into the Saudi justice system. It also shows the abysmal and exploitative labour conditions many workers face, and the utter failure of the justice system to provide redress.

The HRW report is the first comprehensive examination of the variety of human rights abuses that foreign workers experience in Saudi Arabia. The voices of these migrants provide a window into a country whose hereditary, unelected rulers continue to choose secrecy over transparency at the expense of justice.

The stories in the report illustrate why so many migrant workers, including Muslims, return to their home countries deeply aggrieved by the lack of equality and due process of law in the kingdom.

The report is an indictment of unscrupulous private employers and sponsors as well as Saudi authorities, including Interior Ministry interrogators and Shari'a court judges, "who operate without respect for the rule of law and the inherent dignity of all men and women, irrespective of gender, race, and religion."

Some of the most frightening and troubling findings of the report concern mistreatment of women migrant workers, both in the workplace and in Saudi prisons. These workers delivered dairy products, cleaned government hospitals, repaired water pipes, collected garbage, and poured concrete. Some of them baked bread and worked in restaurants; others were butchers, barbers, carpenters, and plumbers.

Women migrants cleaned, cooked, cared for children, worked in beauty salons, and sewed custom-made dresses and gowns. Unemployed or underemployed in their countries of origin, and often impoverished, these men and women sought only the opportunity to earn wages and thus improve the economic situation for themselves and their families.

The report quotes extensively from statements of victims and their immediate relatives. It describes the case of 300 women from India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines who were told to clean up hospitals in Jeddah. They had to work for 12-hour shifts, six days a week; during nights, they were locked in crowded dormitory-style accommodation where as many as 14 women were made to share one small room. Men and women were found to wallow in conditions resembling slavery.

The report says migrant workers were forced to sign confessional statements that they could not read, under the threat of additional torture, the report says.

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