Jakarta (VNA) – The 16th Meeting of the ASEAN Committee on the Implementation of the ASEAN Declaration on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Migrant Workers (16th ACMW Meeting) has been held recently in Jakarta via videoconference.

The event was hosted and chaired by Indonesia’s Ministry of Manpower as the ACMW Chair 2023-2024.

Over 50 delegates from the ACMW focal points of all ten ASEAN Member States (AMS) and the ASEAN Secretariat attended the meeting. Participants from Timor-Leste’s focal points also attended as observers for the first time.

The meeting reviewed the progress on the implementation of the Action Plan (2018-2025) of the ASEAN Consensus on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Migrant Workers. Key outcomes and challenges of the completed initiatives as well as the implementation of ongoing and planned projects were discussed.

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Malaysia has deported 114 Muslim Myanmar nationals who will be persecuted by the ruling military when they return, although they are not Rohingya, their lawyer said Thursday.

Amnesty International Malaysia said Kuala Lumpur returned the Myanmar nationals to their strife-torn country, despite condemning the Burmese junta’s violence against its own people.

Lim Wei Jet, a lawyer appointed for the Myanmar nationals by Amnesty, said the Burmese military, which ousted an elected government in February 2021, ostracizes Muslims.

“It’s against the non-refoulement principle and the right to live, whereby you shouldn’t deport someone back to a country where they will be imminently persecuted because of their race and religion,” he told BenarNews.

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Thai-Cambodian discussions at the recent ASEAN summit put labour issues on the table. Despite the pleasant chat, migrant workers in Thailand have yet to see what, if any, measures the authorities will adopt to help address their problems.

In a bilateral meeting on the sideline of the 40th and 41st ASEAN Summits on 10 November 2022, Hun Sen expressed gratitude to the Thai government for allowing Cambodian workers to enter Thailand and called for further cooperation in the matter.

According to a press release from the Cambodian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Hun Sen and Prime Minister, Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha met to affirm their existing good relationship and continued cooperation in all fields including the entry of Cambodian migrant workers to Thailand.

While the meeting ended on a positive note, Cambodian workers here feel that their government and embassy should do more to protect and help them. 

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t 3.28am on 29 June 2021, Xu Mingjian crept out of a dorm room inside a gated compound in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, and made his way to the second floor, where his friend, another victim of trafficking, was waiting. The two had hatched a desperate plan to escape the modern slavery nightmare they’d been in since Xu was sold to an online scam company in the same building three months earlier, believing a well-paid data entry job awaited him.

They jumped from the balcony onto the first floor of the building next door, hoping to climb down to the ground and run. But Xu landed badly, injuring his spine.

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Garment workers at Thailand’s Brilliant Alliance factory were granted leave, only to learn their employer had shut down when they returned to their worksite in early March 2021. 

“Everyone was abandoned and never went back to work, there was nothing from the company about compensation,” said Jitnawatcharee Panad, a union leader who worked at Brilliant Alliance for 25 years.

None of the 1,250 workers received the severance pay to which they were legally entitled. Severance can include compensation for seniority and lack of prior notice of termination. 

Across Southeast Asia, garment workers have spent years campaigning for companies such as Nike and Uniqlo, a Japanese casual wear brand, to provide severance compensation when their suppliers failed to do so. 

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Human trafficking worsened considerably in Southeast Asia in 2021, with the United States government adding Vietnam, Cambodia, and Brunei to its trafficking in persons blacklist and downgrading Indonesia.

In this year’s Trafficking in Persons (TIP)  report, released on Tuesday, the U.S. State Department scrutinized 188 nations’ efforts to halt human trafficking and punish those responsible.

The report sorts nations into three tiers, with its lowest grade – Tier 3 – reserved for “countries whose governments do not fully meet the minimum [anti-trafficking] standards and are not making significant efforts to do so.”

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In a position statement, the ETI points to a Commission of Inquiry into the decline of workers’ rights in Myanmar established by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in March, noting such a move is the ILO’s highest-level investigative procedure which is generally set up when a member state is accused of committing persistent and serious violations and has repeatedly failed to address them.

The ETI adds unions are reporting the environment in Myanmar has become increasingly dangerous for them to operate in, have safe communications with their members and negotiate with employers and brand companies to settle workplace labour disputes. It says to date, 54 trade unionists and worker activists have been killed by the military and at least 279 trade union leaders and worker activists have been arrested, according to the ILO.

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Early on the morning of 12 February while heading to her shift at the garment factory in Kampong Speu province, Soth Vy was the last of about 40 workers to climb onto the standing platform of the truck that came to her village. She enjoyed the cool breeze as she stood at the back in the dark of dawn. 

“The next thing I remember was the truck suddenly slowing down… then, gradually, it veered off the road,” she said. “And then we fell into a ditch. Then I remember that I was hit by a heavy weight.”

Sandwiched beneath a dozen other passengers, Vy’s hamstring snapped from the crush of people falling on her in the ditch, their weight causing blood clots in her chest, abdomen and ribs.

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Thailand’s government badly wants the middle-income country to achieve advanced economy status. But it will fail unless it raises agricultural productivity and upskills rural workers for jobs in more productive sectors. This will demand hitherto unseen political commitment.

For decades, political leaders have paid lip service to raising farm productivity and indeed, the country became one of the world’s leading rice exporters in the late 20th century. But the agricultural sector remains highly inefficient. Yields for rice, its main crop, lag export rivals India and Vietnam as well as almost all other rice-producing countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, U.S. government data show.

Agriculture employs 31% of workers, a much higher proportion than in similar countries, according to a 2020 World Bank report. But it contributes just 8% of gross domestic product. So each agricultural worker provides a fifth of the contribution to GDP made by typical workers in other sectors. Without reform, the military-backed government of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha will not realize its ambitious goal of raising farmers’ incomes to parity with other workers by 2037.

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Chhim Sithar knew she would be arrested when she arrived at the site of a protest organised by employees of the NagaWorld casino. 

Police violently grabbed and arrested the union leader when she attempted to join the demonstration by striking workers in Phnom Penh on 4 January. Video of the altercation, showing Sithar trying to evade shouting plainclothes officers who swarmed and pushed her into a car, was widely shared on social media.

Sithar was one of 1,329 NagaWorld employees laid off in April during a Covid-19 surge in Cambodia. NagaWorld, which has exclusive rights to operate casinos in Phnom Penh, fired all the union’s leaders and has not given workers their full severance pay, according to the Labour Rights Supported Union of NagaWorld employees (LRSU). 

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