"We are Workers not SLAVES"
GENEVA, 10 December 2010—On International Human Rights Day, the human rights community is celebrating the new UN guidance that offers specific recommendations on regulating and monitoring recruitment processes and working conditions for migrant domestic workers, avoiding sponsorship and other high-risk immigration policies, and increasing access to justice and family unity.
As the world commemorates International Human Rights Day today, 10 December, the International Catholic Migration Commission joins NGOs, migrant associations, labour and trade groups, and domestic workers everywhere in celebrating the release of the new UN guidance on protecting the human rights of migrant domestic workers.
The guidance was adopted 2 December as a “General Comment” by the UN Committee on Migrant Workers to provide States with guidance on how to implement their obligations under the 1990 Migrant Workers Convention—one of the nine core international human rights treaties. The Comment notes that millions of people—as much as 10% of all workers in some countries—perform domestic work.
“This guidance”, says John Bingham, ICMC Head of Policy, “provides one more ‘Yes’ to the questions: Are human rights for everybody? Are there practical ways to implement and protect those rights?” “The resounding ‘hurray’ among domestic workers worldwide speaks not only to how long they have waited for attention to their rights and protection, but to the great hope and expectation that this guidance has created.”
ICMC, together with Caritas Internationalis and the International NGO Platform on the Migrant Workers Convention, led the civil society effort in the development of the guidance, which points to the lack of reference to domestic work and domestic workers in a broad range of national and international frameworks of law and, over the course of its thirteen pages, makes thirty-eight recommendations for change in both laws and practice. read more>>>>>
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