"Slave Conditions" For Asian Workers In Saudi Arabia

by Jim Lobe

(IPS) WASHINGTON -- Asian workers in Saudi Arabia sometimes toil in slave-like conditions, while those who end up in the kingdom's legal system are often held in prolonged incommunicado detention and tortured in order to extract confessions, says a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The document, based mainly on interviews with some of the six million migrant workers back in their home communities in India, Bangladesh and the Philippines, said working conditions are compounded by deeply rooted gender, religious and racial prejudice and discrimination that were often tolerated, if not encouraged by Saudi authorities.

In many cases, officials failed to enforce their own laws or provide any protection to abused workers and their families, adds the 135-page report, 'Bad Dreams: Exploitation and Abuse of Migrant Workers in Saudi Arabia'.

"Saudi Arabia's troubles run much deeper than the terror attacks that are claiming the lives of innocent civilians," said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa division.

"The abuses we found against foreign workers demonstrate appalling flaws in the kingdom's criminal justice system as a whole," she added in a statement. "If the Saudi government is serious about reform, this would be a good place to start."

Most of the 8.8 million foreign laborers working in Saudi Arabia are from Asia, including 1-1.5 million people each from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, nearly one million Filipinos, 500,000 Indonesians and some 350,000 Sri Lankans, most of whom are women. There is roughly one foreign worker for every two Saudis.

These workers perform a variety of tasks, ranging from construction, garbage collection and janitorial work in hospitals and office buildings, to cooking and childcare, to more skilled professions. Unemployed or underemployed in their countries of origin, and often poor, they travel to the Saudi kingdom primarily to earn wages and improve the economic situation for themselves and their families.

While many of these workers eventually return home with no complaints about their treatment, others are made to suffer extreme forms of exploitation and abuse, both in their private employment and at the hands of the public authorities, according to HRW, which said it asked the Saudis for permission to carry out field research in the country but never received a reply.

In order to go to Saudi Arabia, many workers pay large sums of money to recruitment agencies in their home countries, in some cases assuming debt in order to finance the cost.

Even though they enter the kingdom legally, however, they often find themselves at the mercy of legal sponsors and employers who have the power to impose working conditions on them without any effective government oversight. Fearful of losing their jobs and unaware of their rights, most workers do not report abuses.

The report cites Bangladeshi workers who were forced to work 10 to 12 hours a day, and sometimes through the night without overtime pay, repairing underground water pipes; an Indian migrant reported that he was forced to work an average 16 hours a day, while another from the Philippines reported working up to 18 hours a day at a restaurant. Workers were sometimes paid far less than they were promised.

"We found men and women in conditions resembling slavery," said Whitson. "Case after case demonstrates that the Saudis are turning a blind eye to systematic abuses against foreign workers."

The plight of women workers was often particularly dramatic. HRW said several of the interviewees were clearly still traumatised from rape and sexual abuse at the hands of their Saudi male employers and could not talk about experiences without breaking down. In none of the cases did the Saudi authorities investigate or prosecute.

Many women reported being forced to work and live during their off-hours in forced confinement, sometimes literally under lock and key.

In one case, some 300 women from India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines worked 12-hours shifts, six days a week, cleaning hospitals in Jeddah. At the end of each day, they were returned to crowded, dormitory-style housing, with 14 women sharing one small room lined with bunk beds, behind doors locked from the outside.

Similarly, many domestic workers in cities throughout the kingdom reported working at least 12 hours a day and then being confined to their rooms and forbidden to speak with other foreigners.

"The pervasive gender discrimination in Saudi Arabia's legal system, coupled with law enforcement and officials' indifference to women's complaints, places them at great risk," said Whitson.

The most "shocking" treatment experienced by some workers took place in Saudi Arabia's criminal-justice system, according to the report. In capital cases, condemned foreigners were not even aware that they had been sentenced to death, and their embassies were informed, if at all, only after their execution, in violation of the kingdom's treaty obligations.

The workers' families back home never received their bodies or any information about where their remains could be found.

Foreign workers are often held in prolonged incommunicado detention and tortured in order to extract confessions, the report adds. Workers told HRW about being forced to sign confessions that they could not read under threat of additional torture.

"I was so afraid that I did not dare ask what the papers were, or what was written on them," one Indian tailor told HRW about why he signed a confession after two days of beatings in police custody.

Treatment by Shariah, or religious, courts fell far short of accepted norms of due process. None of the workers interviewed by HRW had received legal representation, and both men and women defendants said they were never given an account of why they had been arrested or the status of their cases.

HRW noted a number of cases in which women were held in a Riyadh prison on the crime of "illegal pregnancy."

In one case, a Filipino worker who was imprisoned for five years before being brought before a court was sentenced to 350 lashes because he had signed a confession, obtained under threats and torture, which was untrue.

The report calls for the Saudi government to implement more than two dozen reforms, including ensuring that all foreign workers in the kingdom are informed of their rights while living there; suspending implementation of all death sentences pending a determination of whether confessions were coerced; and halting the arrest and prosecution of women whose crime is pregnancy.

The report also called for an immediate end to the forced confinement of workers and the imposition of substantial penalties against employers who continue the practice.