Lebanese woman jailed for abusing Pinay maid

BEIRUT – A Lebanese woman has been sentenced to 15 days in prison after being convicted of beating her Filipina domestic worker, a rare verdict in such cases in Lebanon, the victim’s attorney said on Wednesday.

A court in the northern town of Batroun also order the defendant to pay $7,200 (4,950 euros) to her former employee, 29-year-old Jonaline Malibagu, attorney Dania Haddad said.

“Forensic experts proved Malibagu was brutally beaten during her period of employment” from 2005 to 2006, said Haddad, who works with the charity Caritas Lebanon.

“We then filed a lawsuit against her employer.”

Haddad said there were witnesses to one beating in 2006, when Malibagu decided to return to her homeland during a devastating 34-day war between Hezbollah and Israel that summer.

Her employer, whose name has not been made public, took her to the Philippines embassy and proceeded to beat her in front of embassy staff, Haddad said.

Jojo Sunga, a welfare assistant in the embassy’s labor department, said Malibagu’s body was “bruised and blue” when she turned up at their door. “She was very weak and could barely stand on her two feet.”

“This verdict is an important step in fighting the abuse foreign workers face.”

Many of an estimated 200,000 foreign domestic workers in Lebanon hail from the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Ethiopia.

According to Human Rights Watch, 90 percent of such workers in Lebanon are subject to mistreatment ranging from having their passports or salaries withheld to being required to work seven days a week.

Ninety domestic workers in Lebanon died on the job between 2007 and mid-2008, almost half of them from suicide.

Ethiopia, Nepal and the Philippines now ban their people from travelling to Lebanon over the tiny Mediterranean country’s laborers’ rights record.  –Agence France-Presse