UPDATES TO KAFALA
The definitive place to get the latest updates on Kafala.
September 29, 2020 | French
D’anciens travailleurs migrants à Beyrouth s’activent depuis Montréal et Toronto pour mettre fin à la « kafala », un système qui offre aux employeurs un contrôle total sur leurs employés.
September 26, 2020 | English
Struggling with the economic crisis, migrant domestic workers in Lebanon were either abandoned by their employers or they decided to walk away after being left unpaid for months.
September 26, 2020 | French
September 26, 2020 | English
On September 4, Lebanon’s caretaker Minister of Labour announced that new system had been finalised which would be a major game-changer in the labour migrant-employer relations. The Standard Unified Contract (SUC), she said would therefore abolish the abusive and inhumane Kafala (sponsorship) system that has for decades been used to bring millions of foreign migrant labour to Lebanon without any guarantees of protection. This came at a time of global outcry about the conditions of domestic workers who have been left on the streets of Beirut and camping around various embassies calling for evacuation amidst the hardest economic crisis that Lebanon has witnessed, following the devaluation of the Lebanese pound relative to the USD.
September 24, 2020 | English
Largely forgotten by international agencies, some survivors of Lebanon’s kafala system were flown home to Ethiopia last week.
September 24, 2020 | English
An abusive system left Ethiopian domestic workers stranded in Lebanon for years.
September 23, 2020 | English
Social media posts and tweets flooded the feeds of Lebanese with news that the Kafala system was on its first step to abolishment, but what is this ‘first step’ and what could happen next, realistically?
September 22, 2020 | English
The standard unified labor contract issued by the Lebanese Ministry of Labor on September 8, 2020, is the first step in a series of measures needed to abolish the Kafala / sponsorship system to which foreign domestic workers are subjected. This contract is the fruit of a series consultations and discussions conducted between a committee – consisting of Kafa, the International Labor Organization, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Caritas, the Legal Agenda and a representative of the L'Orient-Le Jour newspaper – and the Ministry of Labor for over a year. However, Kafa has reservations about the final contract as it was drafted and issued by the Ministry of Labor since it does not take into consideration the mechanisms needed to implement its provisions.
September 22, 2020 | English