KUWAIT CITY // Every June for the past three years, Kuwait's international reputation has taken a beating when the US state department has published its Trafficking in Persons report.
Each time, the wealthy Gulf nation has been ranked as one of the world's worst offenders - along with such impoverished and troubled countries as Zimbabwe, North Korea and Myanmar. While some members of parliament have reacted to the low rank by demanding improvements, others have responded with denial and anger. The speaker of parliament, Jassem al Kharafi, said the last report depicts a "neither true nor accurate" picture of Kuwait.
Another MP, Adnan Abdulsamad, criticised Washington's self-appointed role as the international arbiter for human rights and said it needed to focus on improving conditions in its own country. Saudi Arabia is the only other member of the Gulf Co-operation Council to be ranked in the lowest "tier three" category of countries that "do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making sufficient efforts to do so".
Although the US hopes that naming human trafficking offenders will incite them to change, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) espouses a softer approach. The intergovernmental organisation tries to initiate "close and fruitful co-operation" with its host countries and this week it ran a workshop on counter-trafficking issues for judiciary officials in Kuwait. "Human trafficking is a form of modern slavery. It is, at its core, a violation of the basic human rights," said Jamal al Shammari, the head of the Kuwait Institute for Legal and Judicial Studies, which co-hosted the three-day event. He said human trafficking has links to organised crime, weapons, drugs and the transmission of diseases, and it threatens the stability of countries in which it exists.
"We cannot face such a challenge unless we co-operate together internationally, which requires us to strengthening and passing the legal and the judicial frameworks," Mr al Shammari said. But in an interview after his opening remarks, Mr al Shammari played down the scale of the problem in Kuwait. He said: "Since Kuwait is a small country, we haven't come across a case of trading in humans - it's not here. Even if a person sneezes in Kuwait, everybody will know - they are a close community.
"We are talking about the abuse of labourers only." He said "not many" cases relating to the abuse of labour have reached the court because "in general, it's not that big or wide". He added: "But even if it's a few, it's disturbing us a lot." Mr al Shammari's optimistic view of human trafficking in Kuwait contrasts sharply with the US state department's report last June, which said: "Kuwait is a destination country for men and women trafficked for the purposes of forced labour. The majority of trafficking victims are from the over 500,000 foreign women recruited for domestic service work in Kuwait."
Kuwait's foreign workforce makes up around two-thirds of the country's population of three million. "Some are subjected to the conditions of forced labour from their 'sponsors' and labour agents, such as withholding of passports, confinement, physical sexual abuse and threats of such abuse or other serious harm, and non-payment of wages with the intent of compelling their continued service," the report said.
It continued: "The government is reluctant to prosecute Kuwaiti citizens", adding that, while nobody was punished for the charge of human trafficking that year, 12 individuals were charged with the abuse of domestic labour. That figure was a step up from the previous year, when the US government said Kuwait did not report any prosecutions against abusive employers. The vast majority of cases in which domestic workers claim mistreatment never make it to court, and their rights look unlikely to improve soon. They were recently excluded from a new labour law for the private sector that was recently approved in parliament.
One of the speakers at the event, Humoud al Roudhan, the director of the ministry of foreign affairs' consular department, said the IOM had commended Kuwait on its handling of an incident at the end of last year when the government repatriated more than 700 immigrant workers to Indonesia. Mr Roudhan said the government provided a chartered plane to take the Indonesians home and had processed their documents in "record time".
Many of those repatriated were maids who had sought refuge at the Indonesian Embassy, where officials said it was the worst welfare situation they had ever seen. The incident led Indonesia to bar maids from coming to work in Kuwait. The ban is still in place. The problem of maids who run away from their sponsors is not limited to any one nationality or any particular time of year. The Philippine labour attaché, Josephus Jimenez, told the Kuwait Times in July that between five and 10 Filipina housemaids flee their sponsors every day. He said a number of cases are solved daily by mutually amicable agreement, while others drag on for years without resolution. Around 176 domestic workers were being housed in the embassy at the time.
jcalderwood@thenational.ae