Plights of maids hired by diplomats

WASHINGTON- For three months, Ms Marichu Baoanan said she worked nearly 18-hour days cooking and cleaning in the New York home of Mr Lauro Baja, when he was the Philippines ambassador to the United Nations.

She said she was forced to eat leftovers, sleep on a sheet in the basement, was unable to leave the house unaccompanied and never given a winter jacket. She was paid US$100 (S$127) a month, just six US cents an hour.

In 2008, some two years after she fled Mr Baja's house, Ms Baoanan, who was 39 at the time, filed a civil lawsuit against her employer, accusing him of 15 counts of human trafficking, forced labour, peonage and slavery.

Mr Baja denied the charges and invoked diplomatic immunity.

Ms Baoanan's case is in the news again as activists in the United States seek to draw attention to the plight of domestic workers serving diplomats in the light of the uproar over Indian Deputy Consul-General Devyani Khobragade's arrest.

Dr Khobragade is accused of paying her Indian nanny far less than the minimum wage of US$9.75 an hour mandated by New York law.

Much of the attention has thus far been focused on the diplomatic fallout and the manner of her arrest. But activists say more needs to be said about the treatment of domestic workers.

Last Friday, dozens of them protested outside the Indian consulates in New York and San Francisco calling for better treatment.

There are no official figures that reveal the extent of the problem, said Ms Leah Obias of Damayan, a New York grassroots organisation fighting for the rights of Filipino workers. In the group's 10-year history, she said it has helped some two dozen workers. Half of them had worked for diplomats.

In that same timeframe, Ms Tiffany Williams, campaign coordinator of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a non-profit group that fights for domestic workers' rights and immigration reform, said her group received some 100 complaints, although only about a dozen involved fraud or criminal charges.

A 2008 report from a government watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, identified 42 cases of domestic workers abused by foreign diplomats, but added that the actual number was likely higher.

Ms Obias told The Sunday Times that many workers often suffer in silence, being either unaware of their rights or too afraid to leave their employers.

"We have even had a case where a worker was rescued, but then returned to her employer," she said.

A "rescue" in such cases does not mean police officers barging in. It often involves clandestine phone calls or messages to workers, and then waiting outside a house to pick them up, finding them a place to stay and legal representation.

Often, rescues have to be done in the middle of the night when domestic workers can leave undetected without leaving children under their care home alone.

Ms Williams was part of one rescue in 2009. She and a colleague waited in a car by the house of a domestic worker. When she jumped in, they drove away.

"We helped her to connect to legal services so she could stay in the US," she said. "But we were not able to press charges because of diplomatic immunity."

And that is why the storied tale of Ms Baoanan is often brought up.

In that case, a judge rejected Mr Baja's immunity claim, noting that the civil suit was filed only after the diplomat had stepped down in 2007. He ended up settling the case out of court, although the details were not released.

Many look to the case as an example that domestic workers subject to abuse by diplomats can emerge intact, although they grant that success stories are few and far between. Ms Baoanan's case is one that has made it the furthest in the courts.

But there are other examples. In 2010, Filipino Daedema Ramos, 51, also settled out of court with her employer, a Kuwaiti diplomat, after she complained that he worked her 20 hours a day for about US$1 an hour, with only two days off in eight months of work.

Last year, Mr Somduth Soborun, the Mauritius ambassador to the US, was fined US$5,000 for underpaying his Filipino helper. He also paid US$24,153 in restitution to the worker. He had verbally altered the contract signed with the worker, identified in court documents only as C.V., cutting her pay from US$1,600 to US$1,000 a month and offering no compensation for overtime work.

Then, there are those who flee but never go to court.

In testimony given to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2007, Indonesian Siti Rina Aisah said her employer, a Qatari diplomat, paid her US$150 a month and did not allow her to call her family.

"I never sought the wages my employers owed me because I was so afraid, and I was convinced I would have no chance against my employers because of their diplomatic status," she said.

Similarly, Bolivian Otilia Huayta said her employer, also from the South American nation, told her the contract signed to comply with US wage laws "did not mean anything". She would be paid US$200 a month. She added that she had no recourse because of the immunity enjoyed by the diplomat.

There were also at least two previous cases of domestic workers filing complaints against Indian diplomats.

And while there is hope that the recent case will help raise awareness, there are concerns it could very well have gone the other way.

"We have been pushing the US government to take a hard stand on diplomat trafficking," said Ms Obias.

"And what we are seeing now is the US government actually doing that, and there being a lot of blowback on the part of the Indian government. What we don't want is the US government to now say that diplomatic relations are more important to us than the human rights of workers."

Diplomats behaving badly

In December 2009,the charge d'affaires of Romania in Singapore, Silviu Ionescu, hit three pedestrians while driving a car in a deadly hit-and-run case that triggered widespread outrage. Ionescu initially claimed the car had been stolen, and then fled the country while investigations were ongoing.

His diplomatic immunity and the lack of an extradition treaty meant he could not be brought back to Singapore to stand trial. A Romanian court jailed him for three years.

In 2008, Rafael Quientero Curiel, a Mexican press attache, stole six or seven Blackberry smartphones from the participants of a high-level meeting in the United States.

Security camera footage showed him pocketing them from a table where the officials would leave phones before attending the meetings. When confronted at the airport, he said he picked up the phones by mistake, returned them, claimed diplomatic immunity and got on the plane. He was subsequently fired.

A 2013 parliamentary report in Britain found that since it introduced a congestion charge - its version of the ERP - in 2003, diplomats have flouted the rule with abandon.

Unpaid congestion charges incurred by diplomats as of the end of last year totalled more than £67 million (S$139 million). Staff members of the US Embassy were responsible for 63,349 fines amounting to £7.3 million.

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