Indonesia

Imas Tati still can’t walk properly or stand up for long without a cane. When she moves from one spot to another, she has to grab onto something for support. 

“When I fell from the second floor, I hit the ground feet-first,” she says. “My ankles were shattered. I don’t know when I can walk properly again.” 

That incident occurred in October 2009 in Kuwait, where Imas was employed as a domestic worker. She fell trying to escape from her employer, who the night before had tried to rape her. It was the second such attempt, Imas said. 

Ratifying the United Nations (UN) Convention on International Migrant Workers will put Indonesia in a much stronger position when it comes to negotiating agreements to protect and promote the rights of its migrant workers in other countries, an activist says.

Migrant Care executive director Anis Hidayah said that other countries that had ratified the convention, adopted by the UN in 1990, had succeeded in protecting the rights of their workers and 
families.

 Rescuers searched for survivors Sunday after a wooden ship carrying about 250 asylum seekers, many of them from the Middle East, sank off Indonesia's main island of Java. Only 33 people have been rescued so far, an official said.

Four fishing boats searched for the more than 200 missing passengers who were attempting to reach Australia, but bad weather and 4-meter- (13-foot-) high waves were hampering the efforts, said Lt. Alwi Mudzakir, a maritime police official who was heading the rescue operation.

In 1998, when Anis Hidayah was 20 and studying law in her native Indonesia, she heard a horrific story about a female compatriot who was raped by her employer while she was employed as a domestic worker in Saudi Arabia.

The young woman eventually escaped, but her Saudi boss faced no criminal charges and she was never compensated for her wages or the crime.

Hidayah came from a village in East Java where half of the women in the country regularly left their husbands and children to go abroad, taking up posts as domestic workers in an effort to lift themselves out of poverty.