Addis Ababa, April 19/2023, Ethio Negari:- Ethiopia is recruiting more than half a million of its citizens to send to Saudi Arabia.
Human rights experts said they are concerned about Ethiopia’s mass recruitment of women. Human rights experts have stated that Saudi Arabia’s human rights record is weak.
As a result, the mass recruitment of female workers by Ethiopia is a major concern to humanitarian violations.
Human rights researcher Nadia Hardman said that many Ethiopian workers are still excluded from labor laws in Saudi Arabia and are vulnerable to modern slavery.
According to the system called “Kafala”, if a worker is mistreated and runs away from her employers, she will lose her various documents, including her passport, and this system has not yet been changed, she added.
“Saudi Arabia arbitrarily arrested thousands of Ethiopian refugees and subjected them to torture and death in horrible conditions and forced them to leave the country,” refugee rights researcher Nadia Hardman said.
Therefore, human rights experts should have condemned Ethiopia’s plan to send 500,000 female workers to Saudi Arabia, which has such terrible human rights management.
The female workers sent from Ethiopia are excluded from the labor protection laws of Saudi Arabia and they do not have any legal remedy for the abuses they face.
Ethiopian government must find a solution to ensure full protection, including dismantling the kafala system, which gives workers over to abusive employers.
Human rights experts said that women should not be forced to migrate with false protection and guarantees.
The Ethiopian government is providing training to send 500,000 women to Saudi Arabia this fiscal year and the first travelers moved to Riyadh in mid-March.
Ethiopian women who go to work as domestic workers for a monthly payment of 266 dollars, are between the ages of 18 and 40 and include college and university graduates.
Trainees stated that the opportunity from the government is a golden opportunity of a lifetime that they should not miss.
In 2020, the Council of the European Union passed a resolution condemning the country’s handling of human rights after confirming the torture and killing of Ethiopians in Saudi Arabian prisons.
Ethiopia repatriated more than 100 thousand citizens who were in prison in Saudi Arabia in collaboration with the international organization for Migration (IOM).
