Dec 12th 2015
SMALL stones litter a petitioners’ table outside a government office in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital. Each jagged shard symbolises the rocks that may soon be used to kill a Sri Lankan migrant maid convicted of adultery in Saudi Arabia, who has been sentenced to death by stoning in April. The fate hanging over the as-yet-unnamed woman—a 48-year-old, married mother of two—has provoked mounting rage in Sri Lanka, whose diplomats only learned of the case in August. Her alleged lover, an unmarried Sri Lankan man, is to be heavily flogged.
For years Sri Lankans have helped to meet foreign demand for cheap domestic workers. This has benefited the country, as it has Asian neighbours such as Indonesia and the Philippines. Sri Lankan migrants sent home $7 billion in 2014, equivalent to 9% of GDP; remittances to the Philippines now amount to around $27 billion, much of it from domestic workers. For many women, scrubbing foreign floors is a route out of poverty.
Yet dangers are rife, particularly in Saudi Arabia, which hired nearly 40,000 Sri Lankan maids in 2014. In 2013 a Sri Lankan worker in Saudi Arabia was convicted of killing a baby and beheaded; two Indonesian maids, also accused of murder, were put to death this spring. Far more common are abuses by employers, including physical assaults and withholding of wages.
The failure of maid-hiring countries to give better protection to their paid guests has been fuelling demands in the sending countries for curbs on such labour flows. Since August Sri Lankan authorities have required would-be migrant maids to secure a certified “family background report” proving that they have no children under the age of five. In April the Indonesian government said it would send no more female domestic workers to 21 Middle-Eastern countries. It talks of eventually recalling all its maids from employment around the world.
The motives behind such bans are sometimes suspect. Nationalists dislike the thought of compatriots skivvying for foreigners; conservatives would rather women did not work at all. Nor are bans likely to help migrant workers, who generally choose to become maids abroad because they have no better option at home. In 2012 Nepal briefly banned women under the age of 30 from accepting domestic work in Arab states. Research by the International Labour Organisation suggests that the law did not dissuade many from going, but did make them much more vulnerable to people-traffickers.
Meanwhile, hardly any government keeps a close eye on its citizens working as servants abroad. On December 8th Sri Lankan authorities said they had at last persuaded Saudi Arabia to postpone its planned execution pending a re-examination of the maid’s case (she is said to have confessed under duress). With luck, it will not be too late.