Kuwait acts on slave sale after expose
BLACK MARKET FOR TRADE IN DOMESTICS ON SOCIAL MEDIA
KUWAIT CITY, Nov 2: Kuwait has “a black market” for selling domestic workers via smart applications such as 4sale and social media, as published in a report of BBC News, reports Al-Qabas daily.
In this regard, Head of Kuwait Association for the Basic Evaluation of Human Rights Dr Yousef Al-Saqr highlighted the importance of enhancing Kuwaiti culture in terms of human rights and domestic labor issues.
Commenting on the report issued by BBC, Al-Saqr said Kuwaitis are in general good and loving people who support the needy everywhere in the world, but there is a need to increase awareness about human rights issues especially the way to treat domestic workers.
He explained that the laws of Kuwait ban human trafficking and prevent the confiscation of workers’ passports. However, most of the Kuwaiti families keep their official documents in one place.
Al-Saqr stressed that he is not trying to justify what was mentioned in the BBC report, adding that the use of 4sale website, which specializes in selling commodities, for selling human beings is 100 percent rejected.
Also, Director of Domestic Labor Recruitment in PAM Nasser Al-Mousawi said they keep a tab on suspicious websites, and PAM even contacted some websites to instruct them not to place domestic workers “for sale”, adding that 4sale application had responded and removed the advertisements related to selling human laborers.
Deputy Director General of PAM Dr Mubarak Al-Azmi revealed that the owners of the websites that have commercial advertisements on selling domestic workers were summoned and made to sign pledges to remove such advertisements and never post them again.
He affirmed that PAM coordinates with Ministry of Interior and General Department of Cybercrimes in order to set in place a mechanism for arresting those who post advertisements of this kind, adding that a number of people responsible for such advertisements on social media have been referred to the General Department for Criminal Investigations.
Furthermore, Kuwaiti human rights activist Adel Al-Qallaf said some citizens violate the domestic labor law, enforced in 2015, in different ways such as confiscating the domestic workers’ passports, forcing them to work overtime without payment and preventing them to take weekend breaks, adding that some sponsors assign the workers to do certain tasks that are not part of their job such as forcing them to wash their cars and taking care of their gardens.
Meanwhile, sources revealed that a circular was recently issued by the Domestic Labor Department of Public Authority for Manpower (PAM) to suspend the approval of the contracts of the embassies of countries that export domestic workers particularly the Philippines.
They explained that the reason behind this circular is that those contracts violate the Kuwaiti laws, which exposes a dispute with these countries as they refused to bring
workers without the contracts being signed by the domestic labor offices in Kuwait. If the law is implemented, there will be a crisis concerning the available number of domestic workers especially from the Philippines because of the insistence of the Philippines to sign the contracts with the Kuwaiti party.
In addition, a source from Ministry of Interior said 150 expatriates, most of them Asians, were arrested after confirming they had formed gangs for trafficking domestic maids into the country during the period from January to August 2019.
He explained that the General Department for Residency Affairs conducted investigations with the suspects. Investigations revealed that a number of domestic workers were being sheltered by the gangs in some places after persuading them to abscond from their sponsors in order to “sell” them to new sponsors.
The source stressed that the General Department for Criminal Investigations, in coordination with Ministry of Foreign Affairs, exerts huge efforts to improve the image of Kuwait in terms of human rights and confronting human trafficking.
He revealed that all members of the gangs have been deported and their names have been placed in the blacklist to prevent their entry into Kuwait in the future, adding that the domestic workers who were sheltered by the gangs have also been deported because they violated the laws when they agreed to abscond.
The source explained that the concerned authorities managed to arrest 1,800 individuals for their involvement in human trafficking over a period of three years. In 2018, 420 people were arrested for manipulating the domestic labor law, 520 were arrested in 2017 and 860 in 2016. All these individuals were deported.