10 October 2014
Human rights advocates hailed a recent court ruling as a milestone for migrant domestic workers' rights, after a worker successfully sued her employer for the first time in Lebanon.
This summer, a migrant domestic worker from the Philippines sued her employer in Lebanon's Summary Affairs Court to retrieve her passport, which the employer had confiscated, arguing the worker left before the end of their contract. The presiding judge, Jad Maalouf, found the employer had denied the worker's right to freedom of movement, violating Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is incorporated into the Lebanese constitution.
"To our knowledge [this ruling was] the first of its kind [in Lebanon]," said Sarah Wasan, a legal researcher at Legal Agenda, a Beirut-based NGO. In the past, migrant domestic workers have usually been defendants in Lebanese court hearings: A 2010 Human Rights Watch report found this was the case in 74 percent of 114 examined trials.
