Call for Action on Behalf of Rizana Nafeek

An Open Letter to President Mahinda Rajapakse

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) draws your attention to the appeal made in 2007 into the case of Rizana Nafeek, who went to Saudi Arabia as a maid when she was 17 years old and who was sentenced to death by a Saudi court on the allegation that she had killed an infant of her employer. However, she completely denied the charges and explained that the death occurred as an accident by suffocation while she was bottle feeding the child. As a result of intervention by human rights organisations an appeal was filed on her behalf and the death sentence was set aside.

read more..

The Sydney Morning Herald
Yuko Narushima, Immigration correspondent
October 20, 2010

A FAMILY recruiting Filipino boxers to fight in Australia is under investigation for allegedly keeping the men in slave-like conditions in a Sydney garage.

The immigration department yesterday confirmed it was investigating complaints against a stable of boxers in the western suburbs. The NSW government’s Combat Sports Authority is also aware of the complaints.

The four men bringing the complaint are originally from Cebu in the Philippines. They allege they were stripped of their passports on arrival and were forced into domestic servitude, washing dishes, cleaning toilets and child-minding.
Advertisement: Story continues below

They say they lived in the family’s garage, eating the same rice meals day after day without a heater through winter, and were not paid proper entitlements from title bouts. They allege they were threatened with deportation and, in one case, death if they complained or defected to another manager. read more..

ABC Radio
Simon Lauder
October 18, 2010

MARK COLVIN: Never mind people smuggling, the Australian Institute of Criminology says Australians are largely unaware of another problem which is just as sinister – people trafficking.

The institute has presented research on the problem to the International Serious and Organised Crime Conference in Melbourne. An anti people-trafficking group says the number of people brought to work in Australia against their will each year is probably in the hundreds and there are growing reports that the construction and agriculture industries are involved. read more..

Listen to the audio in mp3 format

The Australian
Sian Powell
October 18, 2010

KYAW-KYAW grimaces as he explains how he was sold, like a spare bit of machinery, to a Thai trawler captain. And how his life then slid into a nightmare of beatings, amphetamines, perpetually interrupted sleep and casual death.

Kyaw-Kyaw is 25 years old, and he can’t read or write. When he was 15 he fled from the violence and crushing poverty of eastern Burma’s Karen state and wound up in the Thai border town of Mae Sot, where he earned a bare living tending water buffalo.

A year ago, a broker arrived in his village offering work and a tempting, up-front inducement. “The broker told me I would have a good job and he gave me 8000 baht [$270] cash,” Kyaw-Kyaw says. “I asked him the nature of the work but he didn’t answer. He just said I would earn 5000 baht ($170) a month.” The broker took him south to the coast and directly to the Thai trawler – which is where he first learned he would be working at sea. “He sold me straight to the fishing boat,” Kyaw-Kyaw says with some bitterness.

Australia spends many millions of dollars a year on wild-caught fish from Thailand, where the industry is fed by thousands of boats of varying sizes and degrees of shabbiness. read more..

ABC News
Simon Lauder
October 6, 2010

It is well known that hotel room cleaners are among Australia’s lowest paid workers, but today a new report alleges many of them are also being ripped off by their employers.

The hospitality union and a migrant women’s group documented the working conditions of hundreds of cleaners at some of Melbourne’s most opulent hotels.

The report was launched by former Victorian premier Joan Kirner, who says Melbourne’s reputation as an events city is being propped up by the exploitation of migrant women.

Ms Kirner launched the report, Heartbreak Hotels, pointing to the story of one worker who says she is paid $5 to clean a room that costs guests $300 a night. read more..

Listen to the audio in mp3 format