EDITORIAL: Protect women’s rights
Saudi Arabia must provide legal and financial protection to the migrant women who are sexually exploited by the employer(s)
The Nepal government has imposed a ban on Nepali women working in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, as domestic help after reports of their sexual abuse came to light. The government had banned Nepali women from working there in 2015.
Despite the ban, many women reach there through illegal channels. In recent times, the number of women returning home either with pregnancy or newborns, especially from Saudi Arabia, is on the rise as Saudi law does not provide the domestic help legal protection. The trend is that once a woman becomes pregnant, she is thrown out of the home where she is working, and she does not have any option other than to take refuge at the Nepal Embassy, which is facing great difficulty in handling such growing number of cases. While the Saudi government does not keep the pregnant women and the children born out of wedlock, the Nepal government also does not recognise the newborns as bona fide Nepali citizens. According to statistics maintained by the Nepali Embassy in Saudi Arabia, such housemaids numbering 50, on average, return home with pregnancy or newborns annually.
This has now become a serious problem for the Nepali Embassy in Saudi Arabia. Most of the Nepali women sneak into Saudi Arabia illegally via Kuwait on a six-month tourist visa. They are rendered illegal after their tourist visas expire. The Nepali Embassy also does not have enough resources to handle all these cases. The embassy officials say most of the Nepali women are illegally trafficked to the Gulf countries with lures of a good and secure job. The embassy does not have records of such women working illegally in Saudi Arabia.
When those women return home, they literally move out of the frying pan into the fire. The children born outside the country – whether due to sexual exploitation or unwanted pregnancy – cannot acquire Nepali citizenship and other facilities a citizen lawfully deserves from the state due to the existing law. Those children whose biological father is untraceable face difficulty in obtaining a citizenship certificate even when they grow up in the country. Many women lawmakers from both aisles have rightly demanded that a child must get citizenship certificate in the mother’s name when his/her biological father is not known. In this case, the government must ensure that women who return home with unwanted pregnancy or with newborns are not left in the lurch. Due to the poor economic base, it is not immediately possible to stop all women from venturing out of the country until the government can create enough jobs here. Until then, the Nepal government must hold serious talks with the Saudi government with a view to protecting the rights of women from other countries working there as domestic help. The Saudi government must provide legal protection to those children born out of wedlock from domestic help. It is also the responsibility of the Saudi government to protect a pregnant woman or a newborn, and also provide both of them with legal and financial assistance when a woman is sexually exploited by the employer(s). It is high time that Nepal and Saudi Arabia immediately reached a labour pact to safeguard the rights of the migrant workers.
Stop distributing land
Every country has millions of people who do not own land, but no government there distributes land for free to such landless people. By distributing land to the landless squatters here, the government is only encouraging the number of such people to multiply.
Hence, even after distributing tens of thousands of hectares of land to such people over the decades, there is no let up to the number wanting land for free.
Instead of distributing land, gainful work should be found for such squatters and have them pay for what they get. The government and the parties should stop using the squatters as vote banks and refrain from passing the land bill.
