SRI LANKA: Domestics Court Risks, Defying Age Bar

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Feb 5 (IPS) Sri Lanka has raised the age requirement for women
wanting to leave the
country to work as domestics abroad, but recruitment agents say this
won’t
prevent younger women from joining the exodus.

And not even the fate that befell Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan domestic
facing
the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, is enough of a deterrent.

Last week, the government announced it was revising the rule to allow only
women over 21 years of age to work abroad as domestics. The limit was
previously 18 years. Officials say lack of experience is likely to get
younger
women into trouble.

"When we send young women, often just out of school, they have many
problems and run away after three months to the Sri Lankan embassy unable
to cope with the situation," said R.K. Ruhunuge, additional general
manager at
the state-owned Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLFBE).

"This (new age bar) will reduce the number of runaways," he
added.

But the new rule doesn’t prevent 18-year-olds from seeking other
employment overseas as either skilled or semi-skilled workers. Domestic
work is considered an unskilled profession.

Recruitment agents, however, say young girls – whose only prospects abroad
are jobs as maids – will merely resort to falsifying papers showing they
are
much older than they really are.

Newspapers have persistently blamed recruitment agents for securing
passports with bogus information on behalf of their clients, a charge
agents
have repeatedly rejected.

"It is the individual who brings such a passport and presents it to
the agent.
For all purposes it is a genuine and legal passport, as it’s issued
by the
Immigration and Emigration Department, but on bogus documents like birth
certificates. So how can we be blamed for this?" asked Faizer
Mackeen,
secretary of the Association of Licensed Foreign Employment Agents
(ALFEA).

Mackeen believes young women like Rizana Nafeek will continue to lie about
their age and provide bogus documents to get a passport.

In June 2007, Nafeek was sentenced to death by a Saudi court after she was
found guilty of murdering a four-month-old infant in her care.

Nafeek confessed to the crime but later said she was forced to do so by
the
police and that the infant had accidentally choked. Nafeek was 17 when she
first entered Saudi Arabia but her passport showed she was six years
older.

In December, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia suspended the death sentence
following a request for amnesty by Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa.
The appeal against the verdict continues in court.

At least 1.8 million Sri Lankans work abroad, more than half of them women
employed as domestics in the Middle East, quite a few aged around 18, or
just older.

SLFBE’s Ruhunuge says the government is encouraging the migration of
professional and skilled workers, rather than unskilled workers like
domestics.
"Professional and skilled workers earn more and the foreign exchange
component to the country is also much higher," he said.

Foreign exchange earnings from migrant workers are expected to reach 4
billion dollars for 2010 from 3.3 billion in 2009. The migrant workers
sector
is Sri Lanka’s highest foreign exchange earner, followed by
garments.

But migrant workers’ rights groups are calling for better safeguards
and
protection of workers abroad rather than depriving them a chance to earn a
living. "Our position is that you can’t stop women from
traveling abroad on
the job. That’s a human right. But we have for many years urged the
government to provide better training and have bilateral agreements with
labour-receiving countries to ensure better working standards," said
Viola
Perera, convener of Sri Lanka’s Action Network for Migrant Workers
(ACTFORM).

Common problems domestic workers face abroad include non-payment of
contracted wages, and physical and sexual harassment.

She said they were hoping to persuade the authorities to enforce the Sri
Lanka
Labour Migration Policy introduced in October 2008. This policy, prepared
by
all stakeholders, says the state is responsible for protecting migrant
workers
and their families under the International Convention on the Protection of
the
Rights of All Migrant Workers and their Families.

"This is a policy with good intentions but there is no legal
obligation on the
government to enforce it," Perera said, adding that if such a policy
has legal
authority, cases like Nafeek’s would not have happened.

Rights groups have repeatedly blamed recruitment agents for helping
migrant
workers prepare bogus birth certificates to secure a passport. But
recruitment
agents say they are often blamed whenever workers have problems, when
victims themselves must accept responsibility.

Wijeya Undupitiya, a former computer systems analyst who set up a
recruiting
office 20 years ago, says he often sees women coming into his office
saying
"happily" that they had gotten their passports using forged
papers.

"They don’t think it is wrong and illegal," he said.

Undupitiya cited the recent case of an 18-year-old boy who was arrested
for
possessing a forged passport. It was the boy’s mother who got him a
job at a
garments factory in Mauritius where she had worked for many years. But
since
the recruitment age was 20 years, the boy resorted to bribing an officer
at the
Immigration Department to falsify his date of birth, getting the job
processing done through Undupitiya’s agency.

"I didn’t know it was a passport obtained under false
pretences. In fact I have
written to the Immigration Commissioner-General to clarify what a forged
passport is because the passport is genuine as it’s issued by the
department,"
he said. "There are many cases where migrant workers produce
passports
which are legally valid but secured by bribing someone at the department
to
insert a false date of birth."