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A migrant sits on the bench to the slavery of domestic service in Lebanon

2022-02-14T05:12:42.023Z


Meseret Hailu, an Ethiopian domestic worker who denounces serious abuses, manages to have her employer and the agency that hired her prosecuted, in an unprecedented case in the country


Meseret Hailu was 29 years old when she arrived in Lebanon from Ethiopia to serve as a live-in domestic in 2011. Like so many migrants, she was looking for a better life for herself and her family, but what she found was a nightmare that began with a mirage: the 13 months in those who received their salary and were able to call home.

Then came a silence that lasted seven years.

According to her account, all that time she was locked in a room in

Madame

's apartment —as domestic servants in Lebanon

must refer to their

wives of hers.

She only left that room to clean up to 15 hours a day, often under a barrage of blows and insults.

She without salary, without vacations and without a single day off.

madam

he took away his passport and even his hair, which he forcibly cut off.

Hailu thought about escaping from her, but the emptiness that opened under the balcony, on a fourth floor, dissuaded her.

The family of this woman in Ethiopia never stopped looking for her and finally knocked on a door that was opened: that of the organization for the defense of these migrant workers This is Lebanon (This is Lebanon), which threatened her employer with making public the abuse if he did not release her.

Two weeks later, in September 2019, Hailu returned to her land with only the clothes she was wearing.

The migrant had escaped from her captivity, but “she was left broken”, explains by videoconference from Amman (Jordan) Antonia Mulvey, executive director of Legal Action Worldwide (LAW), the international organization that, on behalf of this worker, has achieved a milestone in Lebanon.

For the first time in the history of the country, the complaint of a domestic worker against her employer and against the labor agency that hired her, has prospered in a court, that of Baabda, near Beirut.

The defendants face very serious charges: slavery, trafficking, torture, and racial and gender discrimination.

Last Thursday, the employer —the dentist May Saade— appeared at the second hearing of the trial, finally postponed to March 31.

If found guilty, this woman could spend up to 15 years in prison.

The fact that this case has come to trial goes beyond Hailu's "search for justice," emphasizes the director of the legal organization.

The reason is that the ordeal that this migrant experienced, far from being an exception, is close to what humanitarian organizations in Lebanon consider the norm.

“90% of migrant domestic workers in this country suffer similar abuses,” Julia, also a domestic worker, co-founder of the Alliance of Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon, maintains by telephone from Beirut, who asks that her last name not be revealed.

According to the Lebanese Ministry of Labor, some 250,000 migrants work in domestic service in the country, which has 6,825,000 inhabitants;

of them, 1.5 million are Syrian refugees, according to data from the World Bank —in Spain, whose population exceeds 47 million people, there are some 550,000 domestic workers—.

In both States, this profession is feminized but, in Lebanon, it presents another feature: its racialization.

99% of these workers are migrants from Asia and Africa, estimates the UN.

Most of it comes from Ethiopia, Philippines.

Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

In the absence of statistics, it is unknown how many suffer abuse, but organizations such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) denounce that it is a widespread practice.

HRW defines these women as "modern slaves."

Abuses —when not torture, rape or murder— would not be so widespread if domestic workers were not exempt from a labor law that excludes them in its article 7, which deprives them of the right to the minimum wage, a weekly day of rest and the possibility of joining a union.

Nor if the legal status of these women were not subject to a network of laws and norms of custom known as

kafala

(sponsorship), which subjects them to almost absolute control by their employers.

Migrant domestic workers cannot, for example, leave their jobs without authorization from their bosses.

If they do, not only do they lose their work permit and risk being expelled, but they can "end up in a detention center," explains anthropologist Mariela Acuña, who has investigated this phenomenon in the Arab country for six years. .

The term

kafala

, whose origin refers to the hospitality of the Bedouin tribes, denotes protection, welcome.

The paradox is that, in Lebanon and in the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, the system thus named protects the exploitation of these migrant workers.

The tolerance of abuse, racism and machismo that activists describe as systemic in Lebanon close the circle of this scourge: “If the young woman is lucky, she will receive her salary and be well treated.

If they don't have it, they will be subject to any abuse, especially because their place of work, their home, makes them invisible," deplores Acuña, who recounts how "a family lets the worker go out alone or have a day off is seen as a rarity.

In addition, these employees are paid according to their nationality and the color of their skin.

The darker the complexion, the worse the salary.

An Ethiopian can earn the equivalent of €130 a month for the same job a Filipina earns €300 for (the country's minimum wage is around €395).

in Lebanon,

The dehumanization is such that a few years ago "an advertisement proposed one of these employees as a gift for Mother's Day," recalls Acuña.

On another occasion, an employer put his Nigerian intern up for sale on a second-hand Facebook page.

A “right of life and death”

This is Lebanon collects on its Facebook account dozens of stories of migrants enslaved, beaten and imprisoned for crimes they had not committed.

One such complaint is accompanied by a video in which a woman identified as an employer can be heard saying: “They are slaves.

In my family, if someone does something, we kill them.”

The organization believes that many cases of migrant deaths that are dismissed as suicides are actually homicides.

Others die trying to escape, in many cases by jumping from a high floor.

Mariela Acuña maintains that "for years, a migrant has died like this every day."

In 2008, Human Rights Watch estimated that one migrant domestic worker died each week from these two causes.

Both Acuña and Julia, the housekeeper, agree that the

kafala

protects "a right of life and death" over these workers without, until now, any complaint from a victim succeeding.

For this reason, the process of the Hailu case is “a door of justice that opens”, celebrates Julia.

“This judgment sends a clear message and warns employers that if they lock up a human being without paying them, if they confiscate their passport, there is a possibility that they will be charged with serious crimes”, confirms Antonia Mulvey.

Kafala has so

far

escaped attempts to abolish it.

The business that the recruitment agencies move has a lot to do with it.

A report by the Beirut-based Triangle Research Center raised the profits of these agencies in 2019 to more than 50 million euros.

When the Minister of Labor Lamia Yammine proposed in September 2020 a unified contract for domestic workers that would have marked the beginning of the end of that system, the highest Lebanese judicial body, the Shura Council, annulled it by admitting the appeal. submitted by agencies.

The

kafala

, that system that LAW describes as made “by and for the powerful”, is still in force in Lebanon.

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Source: elparis

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