Gulf Monitor Special Report on Saudi Human Rights Watch

Bomb Hoax Disrupts Standard Chartered Bur Dubai head Office for 3- Hours

By V.M.Sathish

DUBAI - July 15, 2004 A bomb hoax has created temporary panic and confusion at the UAE headquarters of Standard Chartered bank, one of the leading western multinational banks with operations in different Middle Eastern countries. The three hour security alert which started from 8.30 am ended at 11.30 as the bank security could not locate any dangerous explosives in the building premises. Full Report

Saudi Arabia: Foreign Workers Abused Torture, Unfair Trials and Forced Confinement Pervasive

(London, July 15, 2004) -- In Saudi Arabia foreign workers—who comprise one-third of the kingdom’s population—face torture, forced confessions and unfair trials when they are accused of crimes, Human Rights Watch said today in a report that offers a rare glimpse into the Saudi justice system.Saudi Arabia’s troubles run much deeper than the terror attacks that are claiming the lives of innocent civilian. Full Report

“Bad Dreams” Exploitation and Abuse of Migrant Workers in Saudi Arabia

“It was like a bad dream” is the way one migrant worker from the Philippines summed up his experiences in Saudi Arabia. Another worker, from Bangladesh, told us: “I slept many nights beside the road and spent many days without food. It was a painful life. I could not explain that life.” A woman in a village in India, whose son was beheaded following a secret trial, could only say this: “We have no more tears, our tears have all dried up.” She deferred to her husband to provide the account of their son’s imprisonment and execution in Jeddah.

It is undeniable that many foreigners employed in the kingdom, in jobs from the most menial to the highest skilled, have returned home with no complaints. But for the women and men who were subjected to abysmal and exploitative working conditions, sexual violence, and human rights abuses in the criminal justice system, Saudi Arabia represented a personal nightmare.

In 1962, then-King Faisal abolished slavery in Saudi Arabia by royal decree. Over forty years later, migrant workers in the purportedly modern society that the kingdom has become continue to suffer extreme forms of labor exploitation that sometimes rise to slavery-like conditions. Their lives are further complicated by deeply rooted gender, religious, and racial discrimination. This provides the foundation for prejudicial public policy and government regulations, shameful practices of private employers, and unfair legal proceedings that yield judicial sentences of the death penalty.

The overwhelming majority of the men and women who face these realities in Saudi Arabia are low-paid workers from Asia, Africa, and countries in the Middle East.

This report gives voice to some of their stories.

It is based on information gathered from migrant workers and their families in mud brick houses off dirt roads in tropical agricultural areas of southwest India, in apartments in densely packed neighborhoods of metropolitan Manila, and in simple dwellings in rural villages of Bangladesh. The victims include skilled and unskilled workers; Muslims, Hindus, and Christians; young adults traveling outside their home countries for the first time; and married men, and single and divorced women, with children to support.

In Saudi Arabia, these workers delivered dairy products, cleaned government hospitals, repaired water pipes, collected garbage, and poured concrete. Some of them baked bread and worked in restaurants; others were butchers, barbers, carpenters, and plumbers. Women migrants cleaned, cooked, cared for children, worked in beauty salons, and sewed custom-made dresses and gowns. Unemployed or underemployed in their countries of origin, and often impoverished, these men and women sought only the opportunity to earn wages and thus improve the economic situation for themselves and their families.

This report is the first comprehensive examination of the variety of human rights abuses that foreign workers experience in Saudi Arabia. The voices of these migrants provide a window into a country whose hereditary, unelected rulers continue to choose secrecy over transparency at the expense of justice. The stories in this report illustrate why so many migrant workers, including Muslims, return to their home countries deeply aggrieved by the lack of equality and due process of law in the kingdom. In an important sense, this report is an indictment of unscrupulous private employers and sponsors as well as Saudi authorities, including interior ministry interrogators and shari’a court judges, who operate without respect for the rule of law and the inherent dignity of all men and women, irrespective of gender, race, and religion.

Some of the most frightening and troubling findings of the report concern mistreatment of women migrant workers, both in the workplace and in Saudi prisons. The report also provides an intimate view of the workings of Saudi Arabia’s criminal justice system, through the eyes of migrant workers with first-hand experience of its significant flaws. And it is the families and friends of migrants who were beheaded, pursuant to judicial rulings, who describe how Saudi authorities kept them and consular officials in the dark until well after the executions were carried out. The mortal remains of these victims were not returned to their families, who until now have no information about what happened to the bodies.

Labor Exploitation

Each chapter of this report includes testimonies from migrant workers who entered the kingdom legally, in full compliance with Saudi government regulations. Many of them paid hefty sums of money to manpower recruitment agencies in their home countries to secure legal employment visas, often assuming substantial debt or selling property to finance the cost. Once in the kingdom, they found themselves at the mercy of legal sponsors and de facto employers who had the power to impose oppressive working conditions on them, with effective government oversight clearly lacking. Unaware of their rights, or afraid to complain for fear of losing their jobs, the majority of these workers simply endured gross labor exploitation.

To cite only a few examples, we interviewed migrant workers from Bangladesh who were forced to work ten to twelve hours a day, and sometimes throughout the night without overtime pay, repairing underground water pipes for the municipality of Tabuk. They were not paid salaries for the first two months and had to borrow money from compatriots to purchase food. An Indian migrant said that he was was paid $133 a month for working an average of sixteen hours daily in Ha’il. A migrant from the Philippines said that he worked sixteen to eighteen hours a day at a restaurant in Hofuf, leaving him so exhausted that, he told us, he “felt mentally retarded.” The employer of a migrant from Bangladesh, who worked as a butcher in Dammam, forced him to leave the kingdom with six months of his salary unpaid.

Women Migrant Workers

Some women workers that we interviewed were still traumatized from rape and sexual abuse at the hands of Saudi male employers, and could not narrate their accounts without anger or tears. Accustomed to unrestricted freedom of movement in their home countries, these and other women described to us locked doors and gates in Riyadh, Jeddah, Medina, and Dammam that kept them virtual prisoners in workshops, private homes, and the dormitory-style housing that labor subcontracting companies provided to them. Living in forced confinement and extreme isolation made it difficult or impossible for these women to call for help, escape situations of exploitation and abuse, and seek legal redress.

We learned that hundreds of low-paid Asian women who cleaned hospitals in Jeddah worked twelve-hour days, without food or a break, and were confined to locked dormitories during their time off. Skilled seamstresses from the Philippines told us that they were not permitted to leave the women’s dress shop in Medina where they worked twelve-hour days, and were forbidden to speak more than a few words to customers and the Saudi owners.

Many women employed as domestic workers in cities throughout the kingdom reported that they worked twelve hours or more daily. Most of them also lived in around-the-clock confinement, at the decision of their private employers, cut off from the outside world. One woman from the Philippines, whose employers in Dammamdid not provide her with sufficient food, described how she enlisted help from the family’s Indian driver, to whom she was forbidden to speak. She told us that she wrote lists of what she needed and threw them out the window to the driver. He made the purchases, and “delivered” them to her by tossing the packages onto the roof of the house, where she retrieved them. Another Filipina, who also worked for a family in Dammam, said that she constantly watched the locked front gate of the house, waiting for an opportunity to escape after her male employer raped her in June 2003.

Human Rights Abuses in the Criminal Justice System
Some migrant workers experienced shocking treatment in Saudi Arabia’s criminal justice system. For those migrants who were executed following unfair trials that lacked any form of transparency, it was their still-grieving families who provided us with pertinent information.

In many cases, the condemned men did not know that they had been sentenced to death, and their embassies were only informed after the fact. “No advance information is given to us before beheading of Indians,” an Indian diplomat said in a television interview in 2003. “We generally get the information after the execution from local newspapers.”

In cases of execution documented in this report, the bodies were not returned to the families, and relatives told Human Rights Watch that they received no official information about the location in Saudi Arabia of the mortal remains.

An undetermined number of foreigners have been sentenced to death in the kingdom and are now awaiting execution. Details of their trials, and the evidence presented to convict them, are treated as closely held state secrets.

Saudi Arabia continues to flaunt its treaty obligations under international and domestic law. Consular officials have not been notified promptly of the arrests of their nationals. Criminal suspects are not informed of their rights under the law. Interrogators from the ministry of interior torture suspects with impunity, behind the curtain of prolonged incommunicado detention, in the quest for confessions whose veracity is tenuous at best. Migrant workers told Human Rights Watch of how they were forced to sign confession statements that they could not read, under the threat of additional torture. A twenty-three-year-old Indian tailor described two days of beatings in police custody. On the third day, his interrogators gave him two pages handwritten in Arabic and instructed him to sign his name three times on each page. “I was so afraid that I did not dare ask what the papers were, or what was written on them,” he said.

Migrants’ accounts of their trials before shari’a courts provide evidence of a legal system that is out of sync with internationally accepted norms of due process. No one we interviewed had access to legal assistance before their trials, and no legal representation when they appeared in the courtroom. One Indian migrant worker told us about a judge who repeatedly called him a liar when he answered questions during his trial. A worker from the Philippines, who was imprisoned for five years before he was brought before a court for the first time, described how a judge sentenced him to 350 lashes because his interrogators had extracted a false confession. The judge justified this corporal punishment because the coerced confession, obtained under threats and torture, was untrue. Interviews with women migrants in the women’s prison in Riyadh indicated that most of them had not been informed of their rights, had no understanding of the legal basis for their arrest or the status of their cases, and had no access to lawyers or other forms of legal assistance.

The Need for Government Action

The stories narrated in this report underscore the pressing need for the government of Saudi Arabia to recognize that its laws and regulations facilitate the exploitation and abuse of vulnerable migrant workers, and reform its laws and practices accordingly.

Some major recommendations are highlighted below, and a full range of recommendations, to Saudi government officials and actors in the international community, is presented in Chapter IX.

One of the most tragic aspects of the situation is that many migrants silently accept the exploitation and deprivation of their rights because they view themselves as powerless and without effective remedy. These workers arrive in Saudi Arabia ignorant or only vaguely informed about the rights they have under existing Saudi law and the actions they can take when inequities and mistreatment occur.

This is a problem that their own governments could address, in part, by way of substantive and effective education before these workers depart for the kingdom. But the government of Saudi Arabia has the primary responsibility to promote and protect the rights of the country’s large migrant worker population in a much more aggressive and public manner, consistent with its obligations under international law. Authorities should provide a clear enumeration of the specific rights that migrant workers are entitled to enjoy under the kingdom’s laws and regulations. They should spell out the specific legal duties of sponsors and employers, provide a comprehensive list of practices that are illegal, and offer detailed instructions about how and where migrant workers can report abuses. This information should be practical, not theoretical. It should draw on specific abuses that migrants are most likely to face, such as those described in this report, and provide authoritative comments and advice. The information should be translated into the languages of the countries of origin of migrant workers, and provided to every worker on his or her arrival in the kingdom as a routine matter of immigration practice. The government should also identify additional means to communicate this information to migrant communities throughout the kingdom as a further demonstration of its commitment to greater protection of their rights.

Saudi authorities must also recognize that many migrant workers are simply too afraid to report abusive treatment for fear of alienating sponsors or de facto employers, inviting retaliatory punishment, and losing their jobs. Government officials must take steps to communicate directly with migrant workers in the kingdom—using all available means, including broadcast as well as print media—to provide assurances that no one will be rendered jobless and summarily deported for complaining about illegal practices and abusive working conditions.

The Saudi government says that it plans to reduce the number of foreign workers by 50 percent over the next decade.1 This objective does not lessen the urgent need for the state to remedy the exploitation of migrant workers who are now in the kingdom and to end discriminatory practices that severely circumscribe their rights under Saudi law. Even if the government’s planned downsizing is achieved within ten years, the kingdom will still be required under domestic and international law to protect the rights of those migrant workers who remain.

If Saudi authorities do not take serious steps to address the patterns of abuse of migrant workers, the issue will continue to be a subject of investigation and scrutiny, on the agendas of international human rights organizations, nongovernmental migrant rights groups in countries of origin, and coalitions of women’s rights and human rights organizations in the Muslim world and elsewhere.

There is public sentiment in the kingdom, and elsewhere in the Gulf region, sympathetic to the plight of migrant workers. No less than the kingdom’s highest Muslim religious authority, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al Sheikh, has already acknowledged that migrants suffer “exploitation and oppression.” His comments, published in 2002 in the Saudi daily al-Madinah, included the observation that “Islam does not permit oppressing workers, regardless of religion….As we ask them to perform their duty, we must fulfill our duty and comply with the terms of the contract.” The Grand Mufti criticized intimidation of migrant workers, and said that it was “illegal and a form of dishonesty” to withhold their salaries or delay payment of wages under threat of deportation. He counseled that Islam prohibits “blackmailing and threatening [foreign] laborers with deportation if they refuse the employers’ terms which breach the contract.”

Another example comes from the neighboring island nation of Bahrain, where the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), a nongovernmental organization, is campaigning for greater protection of women domestic workers. A BCHR official in 2003 described these women as “the most abused of the workforce,” and charged that the government was not doing enough “to break the chain of exploitation that binds them.” The group urged civil society organizations in Bahrain, including women’s rights groups, to take up the issue.

Recommendations To The Government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

To His Royal Highness Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, First Deputy Prime Minister and Commander of the National Guard:

* Appoint an independent and impartial royal commission to conduct a national inquiry into the situation of migrant workers in the kingdom.
o The commission’s mandate should include identifying underlying systemic problems that facilitate abuses and proposing remedies. The commission should focus on criminal justice system flaws that systematically deny basic due process and other rights, and it should closely investigate the role of networks of individuals in the private sector who benefit financially from the exploitation of migrant workers.
o The commission’s members should include men and women, particularly women, who are professionally trained in the fields of law, medicine, psychology, social work, and journalism. The commission should be provided with sufficient resources so that it can employ professional staff to collect and analyze information from victims of abuse, including migrant workers in deportation jails and those who are detained or imprisoned in the criminal justice system.
o The commission should hold public hearings as part of its inquiry. Migrant workers, and their families and advocates, should be invited to give testimony, as should regional and international nongovernmental organizations concerned with the rights of migrant workers.
o The commission should be required to complete its work within a defined period of time, and make its findings and recommendations publicly available.
* Promulgate by royal decree an enforceable “bill of rights” for migrant workers and publicize it widely in the kingdom, using print and broadcast media and other means of public outreach. The decree should be issued simultaneously in Arabic and all the languages of the countries of origin of the migrant worker population. It should delineate, in a comprehensive and detailed manner, all the rights that are granted to migrant workers under the kingdom’s laws and regulations. The bill of rights should serve as a practical educational tool for workers and employers alike, and clarify legal and other ambiguities that lead to abusive treatment.
* Comply with the requirements of the International Labor Organization’s Convention (No. 29) concerning Forced Labor, and make the use of forced or compulsory labor a specifically defined criminal offense under domestic law.
* Impose substantial penalties on employers who withhold the passports and residency permits of migrant workers, and those who charge illegal fees for official immigration documents, and widely publicize the institution of these sanctions.
* Extend the protections of the kingdom’s labor law to all migrant workers, irrespective of job category and gender.
* Take immediate steps to end the forced confinement of women migrant workers at places of employment and residence, and promulgate and widely publicize regulations to this effect. The regulations should impose substantial penalties on employers who continue the practice, and provide fair and equal compensation to the victims, commensurate with the length and severity of their confinement.
* Ensure that the upcoming government report concerning its compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women includes comprehensive information about the situation of women migrant workers in the kingdom.
* Ratify the Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, and urge the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council to do the same.

To the Minister of Labor

* Define, in consultation with the ministry of justice, the specific conditions that constitute illegal forced or compulsory labor, and take all appropriate measures to ensure that employers and workers in the kingdom are aware of these prohibitions.
* Designate a task force to draft a “bill of rights” for migrant workers in the kingdom for submission to the Consultative Council and senior government officials. The task force should work in coordination with its counterparts in the ministry of interior and the ministry of justice.
* Afford migrant workers in deportation jails the opportunity to utilize existing legal mechanisms to file grievance complaints against their employers before departure from the kingdom, and make resources available to them so that they have access to grievance mechanisms.
* Conduct an independent review of the kingdom’s labor grievance mechanisms and, in cooperation with other relevant ministries, make practical recommendations to address the problem of the lack of enforcement of decisions of labor dispute commissions.

To the Minister of Interior

* Bring interior ministry arrest and detention practices into conformity with the provisions of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.
* Inform migrant workers who are arrested as criminal suspects of their rights under the kingdom’s laws, including the rights guaranteed in the new criminal procedure code. This information should be provided orally and in writing, in languages that migrants can understand.
* End as an urgent matter the arrest and imprisonment of migrant women who become pregnant voluntarily or because they were victims of sexual violence.
* Make public detailed information about migrant workers who have been sentenced to death in the kingdom and are awaiting execution.

To the Minister of Justice

* Formulate a legal strategy to meet the requirements of ILO Convention (No. 29) concerning Forced Labor by making the use of forced or compulsory labor a criminal offense under Saudi law, and train prosecutors and judges to thoroughly investigate complaints about this abuse.
* Provide legal guidance to the Interior Ministry to ensure that its arrest and detention practices with respect to foreign nationals are in strict conformity with the provisions of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.
* Take immediate steps to ensure judicial supervision of the investigation of migrant workers who are criminal suspects for the purpose of ending abusive interrogations, torture, and coerced confessions.
* Offerfree legal assistance during investigation and trial to all migrant workers accused of criminal offenses.
* Ensure that no one detained on suspicion of committing a criminal offense will be hampered during investigation and trial because of a lack of fluency in Arabic. Provide professional interpreters for all suspects in such circumstances if their embassies and consular officials have not provided such services.
* Suspend the implementation of the death sentences of migrant workers and others in the kingdom until it can be determined independently that torture was not used and confessions were not coerced.
* Instruct all judges in the kingdom to consider carefully cases of migrant workers charged with criminal offenses that originated with sponsors or employers and may be related to labor disputes. Judges should refer these cases to labor grievance bodies for a decision before continuing with the legal proceedings.

To the Consultative Council of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

* Urge the government to appoint a royal commission of inquiry to examine the widespread abuses against migrant workers, and the public and private systems that enable such abuses to occur.
* Hold open hearings to identify major problems of migrant workers that can be addressed through specific legislative initiatives and reforms. Testimony should be requested from senior government officials – including the ministers of labor, interior, and justice – as well as migrant workers themselves and nongovernmental migrant rights organizations inside and outside the kingdom.
* Recommend that the Ministry of Labor draft, and the government promulgate, a “bill of rights” for migrant workers that sets forth in clear and unambiguous terms practices and treatment that are illegal under Saudi and international law. Further recommend that this bill of rights should be translated into the major languages of the kingdom’s migrant communities and disseminated as broadly as possible, using advertisements in print and broadcast media and in public spaces throughout the kingdom.
* Study the provisions of the Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, and make recommendations to the government about its ratification.

To United Nations Treaty Monitoring Bodies

To the Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)

* Urge the government of Saudi Arabia to submit its long-overdue report on its compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
* Advise the government of Saudi Arabia that the report should include comprehensive information about the situation of women migrant workers in the kingdom, including the human rights violations and other problems identified in this report, and the steps that authorities have taken and will take to address them.

To the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD):

* Advise the government of Saudi Arabia to include in its next report to CERD detailed information and analysis about the composition of the migrant communities in the kingdom, including the gender dimensions.
* Encourage the government to describe the measures it has taken and plans to take to combat prejudices – in the workplace and beyond -- that lead to violations of the rights embodied in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Such measures should include but not be limited to those undertaken in the fields of education, culture, and cultural awareness, and information.

To the Committee against Torture (CAT):

* Urge the government of Saudi Arabia to examine in its next report to CAT how migrant workers have suffered violations of the rights guaranteed in the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, particularly during interrogations to coerce confessions of criminal offenses.
* Request that the government’s report also indicate clearly how it carries out its obligations under articles 13, 14, and 15 of the Convention, with respect to criminal suspects and defendants who are foreign nationals.
* Ensure that the special problems of migrant workers are addressed in the committee’s concluding observations of government’s next report.

To the Labor and Justice Ministers of Countries of Origin, including Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka

* Disseminate this report within their countries and discuss its recommendations.
* Raise formally with your counterparts in Saudi Arabia the importance of the kingdom launching an independent national inquiry concerning labor-related and other human rights abuses of migrant workers.
* Urge the government of Saudi Arabia to promulgate an enforceable “bill of rights” that will be applicable to all migrant workers in the kingdom, including women and men employed in domestic service and agriculture.
* Stress the importance of ending the forced confinement of women migrant workers, and urge Saudi authorities to make this practice a criminal offense under Saudi law.
* Urge that Saudi authorities, particularly the ministry of interior, fully uphold the kingdom’s legal responsibilities under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.
* Urge Saudi authorities to afford to migrant workers all the rights set forth in the kingdom’s new criminal procedure code.
* Request immediate and full disclosure of all relevant information about your country’s citizens who have been sentenced to death in shari’a courts and are awaiting execution.
* With respect to these death penalty cases, request without delay the minutes of the court hearings of these defendants, pursuant to article 156 of the new criminal procedure code. Article 156 states: “Court hearings shall be attended by a clerk who records the minutes under the supervision of the Chairman of the hearing. This record shall indicate the name of the judge(s) of whom the court is composed, the name of the prosecutor, place and time of the hearing, names of the litigants present and their advocates, their statements and claims, a summary of their pleadings, the evidence – including testimony of witnesses, any action taken during the hearing, and wordings and bases of the judgment. Each page of this record shall be signed by the Chairman, by the members of the court, and by the clerk of the court.”
* Strengthen the support mechanisms for migrant workers in Saudi Arabia .

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