-By A LeN Investigations Correspondent
(Lanka-e-News -07.Aug.2025, 11.30 PM) For nearly five decades, a silent exodus has continued from the villages of Sri Lanka. Women—mothers, daughters, wives—board flights bound for the oil-rich capitals of the Middle East. Their destination: private homes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and beyond. Their job: domestic work. Their reality: often, something far closer to modern-day slavery.
Since 1977, an estimated 8.9 million Sri Lankan citizens, the overwhelming majority of them women, have taken up work as domestic help in countries across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) bloc and the broader Middle East. Drawn by the promise of jobs and driven by poverty and economic desperation at home, these workers have underpinned the economies of their host nations, while remittances have become a lifeline to Sri Lanka’s balance of payments. But the personal cost has been devastating.
A growing number of human rights activists, legal experts, and international labour advocates are now calling on the Sri Lankan government to take the unprecedented step of demanding an international charter for domestic workers—and a compensation fund worth over $6.5 billion for unpaid and underpaid Sri Lankan workers across the region.
“For 47 years, we’ve sent our women to serve in foreign homes. They’ve cared for children not their own, cleaned houses they’ll never own, and slept on kitchen floors,” says Ramanayake, a Colombo-based human rights lawyer who has championed domestic workers’ rights for two decades. “And in return, they’ve received barely enough to survive.”
The scale of the abuse is staggering. According to internal estimates from Sri Lanka’s Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE), more than 29,000 Sri Lankan domestic workers have formally reported abuse ranging from overwork and unpaid wages to sexual assault and imprisonment. The real number, observers say, is likely to be several times higher. At least 190 Sri Lankans have died under suspicious or unexplained circumstances. One was executed, a domestic worker named Rizana Nafeek, in 2013 in Saudi Arabia—convicted of killing a child under her care, a charge she denied. She was only 17 when arrested, and possibly underage at the time of employment.
“What we’re seeing is systemic, long-term, institutionalised exploitation,” says Dr. Aslam, a regional researcher at Amnesty International. “Women are trafficked under legal visas and contracts but are then turned into indentured servants with no right to rest, redress, or even return home.”
At the heart of this abuse lies the Kafala system, the legally sanctioned sponsorship mechanism prevalent in many Gulf countries. Under this system, a domestic worker's legal status is tied to their employer—meaning they cannot switch jobs, leave the country, or even lodge complaints without the employer’s permission.
The result is a power imbalance ripe for abuse. Many domestic workers have reported having their passports confiscated, being forced to work 16 to 20 hours a day, denied access to mobile phones or communication, and physically or sexually assaulted with little legal recourse.
Language barriers, cultural isolation, and religious discrimination exacerbate their vulnerability. Sri Lankan women, many of whom speak only Sinhala or Tamil, are often unable to understand contracts or even lodge police complaints in Arabic-speaking states. A significant portion also face religious discrimination, especially –Buddhists, Christian and Hindu workers in majority-Muslim nations.
“I worked in a house in Kuwait for three years,” says Nimali, a 46-year-old returnee now living in Galle. “I was promised $300 a month. I received only $100. I was not allowed to go out even once. They took my phone. I never saw my passport again. I became their prisoner.”
Sri Lanka first opened the gates for female domestic workers to go abroad in 1977, at the dawn of its open economic policy. What was once an ad hoc phenomenon soon became a structured industry. By the 1990s, female labour migration had become the single largest source of foreign remittances, surpassing tea, rubber, and tourism.
Yet for all the revenue, the state offered scant protection. While SLBFE mandates compulsory pre-departure training and sets minimum wage guidelines, these are rarely enforced in host countries. Once workers leave Bandaranaike International Airport, they enter a legal vacuum—no oversight, no embassy-level advocacy, and no insurance for the trauma they may endure.
The Sri Lankan embassies in Gulf countries are chronically understaffed, under-resourced, and ill-equipped to deal with the thousands of complaints that pour in. "Even when our citizens manage to escape abuse and reach the embassy, they often find little more than bureaucracy and indifference," says a former consular official in Riyadh.
The demand now gaining traction is not just for better future protections—but a reckoning with the past.
A 2023 report by the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons estimated that workers from Sri Lanka and other South Asian nations have been underpaid by an average of 40 to 60% over the last four decades. Applied retroactively, Sri Lankan women alone may be owed more than $6.5 billion in unpaid or underpaid wages, based on basic international wage benchmarks and reported working hours.
This has prompted a consortium of NGOs and lawyers to draft a proposal for the “Gulf Domestic Workers Compensation and Rights Charter”, which calls for:
A legally binding international agreement under the UN or ILO to protect the rights of domestic workers in the GCC region.
A regional compensation fund, jointly financed by the GCC nations and administered through a neutral international body, to compensate past victims.
A database of abuse and fatalities, maintained by Sri Lankan foreign missions, and publicly reported annually.
Minimum wage parity laws that equalise pay for Sri Lankan workers with other foreign nationals doing similar work.
Legal support and language access units in all Sri Lankan embassies in the Gulf.
Sri Lanka is not alone. India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and the Philippines have also struggled to protect their citizens in the Gulf. Yet many of these countries have taken bold action.
The Philippines, for example, suspended labour exports to Kuwait in 2018 after a series of gruesome worker deaths, and negotiated a bilateral labour agreement that introduced better protections, including a minimum wage and a rest day.
India now maintains a national registry of overseas workers and mandates that all contracts be verified through government channels. It also pays for legal assistance to distressed workers in some GCC countries.
Bangladesh and Nepal, facing similar abuse, have reduced the flow of women to Middle Eastern domestic work entirely—opting instead to promote factory work, construction, and health services jobs that are less isolating and better regulated.
In stark contrast, Sri Lanka continues to send an estimated 80,000 domestic workers per year, many of them to the very countries with the worst abuse records.
There is increasing criticism that successive Sri Lankan governments have been willfully complicit, choosing to prioritise foreign exchange earnings over human dignity.
“It’s hard to escape the conclusion that we sold our sisters for remittances,” says Dr. Harsha Perera, an economist and former policy advisor to the Ministry of Labour. “The numbers don’t lie. It was more profitable to send housemaids than to export goods. So the suffering was accepted as collateral damage.”
The government’s own data reveals that remittances from Middle Eastern workers contributed nearly $3 billion annually at peak levels—enough to fund entire national budgets. Yet almost none of that money has been reinvested into worker welfare schemes, trauma counselling, or reintegration programmes for returnees.
With a new administration in Colombo under President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, there is growing political pressure to act.
The parliamentary committee on foreign employment, recently proposed a bill to investigate historical abuse and assess compensation eligibility. “The time has come for Sri Lanka to speak with moral authority,” Chairmen told parliament. “Our silence has lasted too long. The Middle East cannot be allowed to treat our women as disposable.”
Civil society groups are now preparing for a class-action lawsuit, potentially filed in European courts, citing violations of international labour law, human trafficking statutes, and fundamental human rights conventions.
For the thousands still trapped in kitchens and corridors of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, justice may be slow in coming. But momentum is building.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) has quietly begun consultations with stakeholders in Colombo, Riyadh, and Geneva about the proposed Gulf Domestic Workers Charter. The UN Special Rapporteur on Modern Slavery has also raised the issue in its last session.
But without Sri Lanka’s active and aggressive diplomacy, the proposal may wither.
“This is not just a legal issue. It’s a moral one,” says Ramanayake. “Our country owes these women more than apologies. We owe them justice. And that justice begins with a Charter and a cheque.”
-By A LeN Investigations Correspondent
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Sidebar: By the Numbers
8.9 million Sri Lankans have worked as domestic workers in the Middle East since 1977
$6.5 billion estimated total underpayment
29,000+ abuse cases officially recorded
190 deaths and 1 execution
$300/month: promised average wage
$150/month or less: what most were paid
47 years: duration of this labour migration stream
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by (2025-08-07 19:34:28)
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