MANILA, Philippines – Vice President Jejomar Binay on Tuesday said that host countries for migrant workers failed to protect migrant workers’ rights, deploring they lacked a strong legal framework to support labor and recruitment policy under international human rights standards.
“Human trafficking and human smuggling or illegal recruitment flourish in part because destination countries do not complement the efforts of labor-sending countries at combating these twin evils in labor migration,” Binay said in a speech he delivered at the 23rd Conference of the Presidents of Law Associations in Asia (POLA) held in Pasay City.
Binay, in his speech, noted reports from the International Labor Organization (ILO) saying that a large number of migrant workers from Asia were working illegally, especially in the Arab region.
“A report on Asian women’s labor migration mentions cases of abuse against domestics, including long working hours, no days off, restriction on freedom of movement and association, lack of pay, and physical and sexual violations,” Binay said.
He also added that labor exporting countries like the Philippines should start working on a bilateral rather than multilateral framework approach in securing the best possible deal for their overseas workers, and lamented how the enforcement of international laws and other instruments promoting migrant laborers’ rights were only optional for destination countries.
“The ILO has put forward a framework for a rights-based approach in labor migration, delineating obligations between the country of origin and the country of destination in the enforcement of the rights of overseas workers. Pushing for its adoption as a convention is the shared responsibility of every country,” Binay said.
“But even if it becomes a binding form of international law, like similar instruments, its enforcement remains an option for host countries,” he added
Binay also said that due to their advances in culture and economics, more advanced countries dictated the “rules of the game,” especially in the practice of getting cheap foreign labor to service their own citizens.
Binay, however, noted that the Internet had been useful in helping the labor-sending countries through reinforcing issues of human trafficking and globalized employment with corporate social responsibility, globalization, and the legal profession.
“It is the fact that the role of the legal profession is being rewritten in this age of the Internet, where transparency and accountability are once again the norms upon which human society and our systems of law and order are being built and fortified,” Binay said.
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