RI maids on death row in Singapore

RI maids on death row in Singapore

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The government has pledged to make maximum efforts to provide
legal protection for five Indonesian migrant workers who may face
death sentence in Singapore.

Minister of Manpower and Transmigration Jacob Nuwa Wea said
that he had been coordinating with the foreign ministry to lobby
the Singaporean authorities and to hire professional lawyers in
Singapore to represent the uneducated workers.

"We are coordinating with home minister Hassan Wirayuda to
lobby his Singaporean counterpart and other relevant officials to
help them understand the troubles the five workers are facing,"
he said after delivering a speech in a seminar organized by the
Atmajaya Catholic University in Yogyakarta on Wednesday.

Nuwa Wea said that according to an official report he received
from the Indonesian Ambassador to Singapore Mochamad Slamet
Hidayat on Tuesday, the five workers, all female and employed as
domestic helpers, are facing murder charges, which according to
the Singapore law, carry the maximum penalty of death.

The five women are Sundarti Supriyanto, Purwanti Pandji,
Sumiyati, Juminem and Siti Aminah. Sundarti, Purwanti, Juminem
and Aminah were charged with murdering their employers while
Sumiyati was charged with manslaughter for negligence that caused
the death of her employer's child.

The minister said he did not know why the four migrant workers
killed their employers but according to the ambassador's report,
prosecutors have laid murder charges mostly because the workers
could not communicate in English with the police and the court
and could therefore not defend themselves adequately.

"With intensive lobbying with the relevant authorities in
Singapore and the engagement of qualified lawyers, we hope the
five workers will be acquitted of the murder charges, or given
lighter penalties," he said.

Many Indonesian workers have been killed or tortured in Middle
East while resisting rape attempts by their employers.

Mulyadi, a lawyer of the Legal Aid for Migrant Workers
Institute (Kopbumi), which has helped handle Sundarti's case,
said Sundarti killed her employer in a clash in June 2002 after
enduring repeated acts of violence by her employer, a woman.

He said that Sundarti had stood trial three times and the
court verdict was expected to be issued this year.

Chalief Akbar, the press and cultural attache of the
Indonesian Embassy in Singapore, said that the embassy had
accompanied the workers when they were undergoing police
interrogation and when they stood trial in court.

Currently, the number of Indonesian workers registered with
the embassy has reached 28,000 and there are around 20,000 other
workers who are not registered, making it difficult for the
embassy to monitor them.

"We want them to have maximum representation by lawyers to
have the death sentence overturned or to get as light a sentence
as possible," he said, while concurring with the minister's
statement that they were charged with the maximum sentence of
death due to their inability to speak English.

Chalief said further that the embassy had spoken to the
Singapore manpower ministry to help improve relations between
Singaporean employees and their Indonesian domestic helpers.

"Singaporean people should not recruit workers who are
unskilled and unable to speak English or Mandarin to help avoid
problems during their employment," he said.

He said he had also lobbied the Singapore government to create
an occupational safety program to prevent accidents among
Indonesian workers.

"As many as 97 Indonesian workers have died in work-related
accidents between 1999 and 2004 and most incidents happened
because of a lack of safety equipment." Many domestic helpers
have fallen to their death while cleaning windows in high-rise
apartments.