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Indonesian migrant worker Yuli fights for her rights
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Protesters dig up paving bricks outside the MTR train station at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in Hong Kong on November 12, 2019. Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters fought intense battles with riot police on a university campus and paralysed the city's upmarket business district Tuesday, extending one of the most violent stretches of unrest seen in more than five months of political chaos.
(AFP/Dale De La Rey)
I
t never occurred to 39-year-old domestic worker Yuli Riswati that she would be deported from Hong Kong to Indonesia after she reported on the city’s ongoing protests.
She was found guilty of failing to extend her visa and so the authorities put her on a flight to Surabaya last Monday. However, along with her supporters, she alleged her deportation was politically motivated.
Yuli, who has a two-year employment contract until January 2021, renewed her passport in July but forgot to extend her visa. Reports say Yuli had been detained for 28 days for immigration violations.
Prior to her deportation, Yuli -- who won a Taiwan Literature Award for Migrants last year for her short story about migrant workers -- had been documenting the protests in Hong Kong on Indonesian news site Migran Pos, which she initiated together with three fellow migrant workers in March. She said it was first intended to give Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong reliable information about the Indonesian presidential election amid rampant misinformation. After the election and before the protests broke in June, her past articles on migranpos.com were mostly about migrant workers in Hong Kong.
"I invite friends who have the same mission and vision to write in the Migran Pos to provide correct information. So, this is about the activities of migrant workers and their family," Yuli told The Jakarta Post at the Surabaya Legal Aid Institute (LBH Surabaya) in East Java on Friday.
NGO Migrant Care Indonesia and human rights group Amnesty International Indonesia have called on the Indonesian government to file a complaint with Hong Kong authorities against Yuli's deportation. They criticized Hong Kong’s treatment of Yuli -- who they described as an activist and a journalist -- saying it was repressive and unusual.
Yuli found her case in Hong Kong to be unusual, particularly since she has a valid employment contract and her employer offered to endorse her. She said her employer once told her that the immigration office had described her case as "special" without Yuli knowing exactly what that meant.
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