By JONNY PAUL, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT
LONDON - In a report published last week, Amnesty International said that tens of thousands of female migrant domestic workers in Jordan live in appalling conditions, with many being denied their salaries and forced to work up to 19 hours a day.
Amnesty has documented numerous cases of employers in Jordan severely physically abusing domestic workers; in one case a Filipina in her 40s was locked in a room for two hours and severely beaten by a man the employer's family had asked to do so.
In other cases, the London-based rights organization said that women had been raped and driven to suicide, with studies showing that domestic workers were much more likely to take their own lives than any other group.
A spokesperson for the ambassador at the Embassy of Jordan in London said: "We are aware of the [Amnesty] report and the [Jordanian] government in Amman will be issuing an official response."
The spokesperson was unable to say when the time scale of the government response will be.
Amnesty said the problem was so severe that each of the embassies of Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, the countries where most of the country's 40,000 registered female migrant domestic workers come from, had established migrant worker shelters.
Amnesty is calling on the Jordanian authorities to urgently put in place legal safeguards for migrant workers, in particular by following through with ongoing legislative efforts for their protection.
"We call on the Jordanian authorities to seize this golden opportunity to make the exploitative conditions currently faced by migrant domestic workers a thing of the past. Their actions should be bold enough to match the scale of the abuses," said Philip Luther, Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa deputy program director.
In July, the Jordanian parliament amended its Labor law. One amendment stipulated that a separate regulation would be issued to define the terms of employment for migrant workers, their working hours and rest periods. The legislation has yet to be put into practice.
Amnesty's report shows that many female migrant workers are in effect imprisoned in their employers' homes, have their passports confiscated and work long hours for little or no wages.
Migrant workers in Jordan also suffer physical, psychological and sexual abuse, and several have fallen to their deaths in recent years - their deaths were recorded as "accidents," but the incidents remain inadequately investigated and explained, Amnesty said. Around 10 domestic workers are believed to commit suicide every year.
Amnesty reported that abuse of migrant workers in Jordan is reinforced by a climate of impunity enjoyed by recruitment agencies, both in Jordan and in migrant workers' home countries, where regulation and monitoring are inadequate.
They are calling on the Jordanian government to establish government-funded shelters for domestic workers fleeing abuse or exploitation.
"The Jordanian authorities must subject the practices of recruitment agencies to proper scrutiny and bring to justice all those responsible for abuses of migrant domestic workers, whether they are employers or representatives of agencies," Luther said.
