Death sentence for migrant worker
Saudi Arabia is due to behead a Sri Lankan woman in a case that has focused
attention on the plight of migrant workers.
Adithya Alles Last Modified: 16 Nov 2010 11:51 GMT
Barely a month into her job in Saudi Arabia, Rizana Nafeek was charged with
killing her employers' baby [EPA]
When a relative approached Mohamed Nafeek in 2005 to explore the possibility of
sending his eldest daughter, Rizana, to the Middle East as a domestic worker,
the family thought its luck had finally turned for the better.
Poor, living in a ramshackle shack in Muttur, a coastal village in Trincomalee
district 250km from the Sri Lankan capital Colombo, the family of six barely
managed to survive on the meagre earnings Nafeek made as a wood collector.
Rizana, according to the family, agreed to the job. The relative took her to a
recruitment agency. She then underwent 10 days of training before leaving for
Saudi Arabia in May 2005.
But instead of changing the family's luck, Rizana's life turned inside out in a
foreign land. Barely a month into her job, she was sitting in a jail charged
with killing the four-month-old infant of her employers.
She was later found guilty and sentenced to die by beheading. She appealed her
sentence and has spent the last five years in a Saudi jail. In October, news
reached Sri Lanka that her sentence had been confirmed and would thus be
carried out.
That news has generated renewed focus on the case of Rizana Fathima Nafeek, and
the issue of Asian migrant workers getting a fair hearing in a foreign justice
system, both here and internationally.
Mahinda Rajapaksa, the Sri Lankan president, has written to Saudi Arabia's King
Abdul Aziz seeking a pardon. Similar appeals have been made by Amnesty
International, the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) and other Sri Lankan
and international advocacy groups.
Unfair proceedings
The AHRC says Rizana's trial was skewed against her, citing factors like
language issues and competent legal support that often make it hard for migrant
workers to ensure that they get fair proceedings. For example, the translator
provided during Rizana's confession, which the AHRC maintains was taken under
duress, was not a professional one, AHRC director of policy and development
Basil Fernando points out.
"He was just someone from Karnataka [state] in India, who did not have any idea
of the Tamil dialect that Nafeek spoke," Fernando said. The translator has
since left Saudi Arabia.
Evidence indicated that the infant choked while Rizana was feeding him, in what
was an accident and not intentional murder, Fernando adds.
No legal aid was extended to Rizana during the trial. The Sri Lankan embassy in
Riyadh had contacted a lawyer only after her conviction. When it could not hire
the lawyer due to government stipulations that prevent it from paying for legal
services in a criminal case, the Hong Kong based AHRC moved in.
It has so far spent $30,000 in legal fees for the appeal of Rizana's verdict.
The case is complicated by the fact that Rizana was underage when she left for
the Middle East. Some reports have suggested that she was 15, but her family
told IPS she was 17 at the time of her departure. Either way, she was a minor
below the age of employment when she left.
Rizana's forged passport became pivotal to her conviction when the courts went
by details contained in that, and did not consider her birth certificate.
"The passport she used to enter Saudi Arabia gives her date of birth as
February 1982 but according to her birth certificate she was born six years
later, in February 1988," Amnesty International said in an October appeal.
"This would make her 17 years old at the time of the murder for which she has
been convicted. According to Amnesty International's information, she was not
allowed to present her birth certificate or other evidence of her age to the
court, which relied instead on her passport and so considered her to be 23
years old at the time of the crime," it added.
Victim of recruitment agencies
Advocates say that Rizana was a victim of recruitment agencies that send poor,
untrained Sri Lankan women as unskilled domestic workers to the Middle East,
including to countries like Saudi Arabia, which hosts some 500,000 migrant
labourers from the South Asian island nation.
"We never heard from the agency [that sent Rizana to Saudi Arabia]. We only got
a letter from the [Sri Lankan] embassy [in Riyadh] about the sentence," her
mother Razina said.
Rizana's case came into the limelight after media reports highlighted her death
sentence. AHRC officials told IPS that when Saudi Arabia's Supreme Court upheld
the verdict, they heard the news not through the Sri Lankan embassy but through
a well-wisher who had visited Rizana in jail. They now fear that if Saudi
Arabia's king ratifies the sentence, there would no chance of pardon.
"There is every probability that the execution of Rizana might be carried out
without warning in the very near future. Saudi Arabia has an infamous record of
having one of the highest executions rates in the world with at least 69
executions carried out in 2009, 102 in 2008 and 158 in 2007, an average of
almost two persons a week," AHRC said in a statement.
Fernando adds that a two-track approach is needed to try to save Rizana from
the executioner's sword. One is to lobby the Saudi monarch through national and
international campaigns. The second is for the family to use diplomatic means
to seek a pardon under Saudi law.
Fernando said: "The king is the last option, before that someone should speak
to the family."
This article first appeared on the Inter Press Service News Agency.
Source:
IPS
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