News: domestic workers

RIYADH: The family of a Sri Lankan maid murdered in Saudi Arabia has agreed to pardon her killer and accept SR50,000 in blood money, the Sri Lankan Embassy here announced on Tuesday.

COLOMBO, 9 December 2010 (IRIN) - After a string of abuse cases against Sri Lankan domestic workers in Saudi Arabia, the International Labour Organization (ILO) is working with the government of Sri Lanka to promote skilled labour migration - as opposed to domestic work - as a way to protect those who choose to leave the country to make a living.

Spending five years in a Saudi Arabian jail while facing death by beheading would be traumatic for anyone, let alone for a 17-year-old thousands of miles away from home. But that's exactly what Rizana Fathima Nafeek, who moved to Riyadh from Sri Lanka to work as a maid, has endured since 2005. Nafeek, now 22, has spent the past half-decade in a Riyadh prison facing a death sentence in a country where she does not speak the language and where she does not have any relatives. Her job, obtained through a Sri Lankan recruitment agency, was supposed to be the ticket out of abysmal poverty for her family, says her mother, Razeena Nafeek. The family of six found it hard to get by on the income that Mohammed Nafeek, her father, earned as a woodcutter in the remote village of Muttur, east of Colombo. "We pinned all our hopes on the job," she adds.