Rights group: Domestic workers in Saudi Arabia subjected to severe abuse

The Associated Press ,  Riyadh, Saudi Arabia   |  Tue, 07/08/2008 5:26 PM  |  Headlines

Domestic workers in Saudi Arabia are often subjected to abuse that in some cases amount to slavery, as well as sexual violence and lashings for spurious charges of theft or "witchcraft," a human rights group said Tuesday.

A 133-page report released Tuesday by Human Rights Watch urged Saudi Arabia to implement labor, immigration and criminal justice reforms to protect the workers, saying employers often face no punishment for such abuses.

The report said that rather than receiving justice, domestic workers - most of them migrants from Asia - are more likely to face counter-accusations of witchcraft, theft or adultery.

"In the best cases, migrant women in Saudi Arabia enjoy good working conditions and kind employers, and in the worst they're treated like virtual slaves. Most fall somewhere in between," said Nisha Varia, senior researcher in the Women's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.

According to the report, the kingdom employs an estimated 1.5 million domestic workers, primarily from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Nepal. Smaller numbers come from other countries in Asia and from Africa. They are denied rights afforded to other workers under Saudi labor laws, Human Rights Watch 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," Varia said.

Suhaila Hammad of Saudi Arabia's National Society for Human Rights dismissed the report as "unfair and one-sided."

"I wish that when rights groups do their reports they would listen to both sides of the story," Hammad told The Associated Press. "We're being unjustly portrayed and the crimes against us by the workers are never mentioned."

Hammad said crime rates in the kingdom have increased in recent years because of crimes committed by foreign workers. The country is also home to 5.6 million foreign workers employed in sectors such as oil, business and engineering.

"They smuggle drugs, they turn apartments into liquor factories, they practice prostitution, they steal and sometimes they kill," she said. (***)

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