VP Binay orders mandatory interviews for OFW repatriates

All Filipino workers who will be evacuated from conflict-stricken countries will now be interviewed upon arrival in the country, Vice President Jejomar Binay said after the discovery of many underaged workers being sent abroad.

Binay, also a presidential adviser on overseas Filipino workers concerns and chairman of the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking (IACAT), proposed this measure, saying this would help the IACAT build a database of repatriated Filipinos and offloaded international-bound passengers and determine the manner of deployment.

“It would also help establish a possible pattern of deployment being done by illegal recruiters and trafficking syndicates, minimize re-victimization of Filipino irregular OFWs, minimize repatriation costs,” Binay said.

On Jan. 7, a female worker who was among those evacuated from strife-torn Syria and looked very much younger than her declared age, admitted that she was a minor and said the passport she was using was not hers.

Binay said the IACAT also hopes to identify recruitment agencies violating existing deployment rules in the country as well as government officials and personnel involved in illegal recruitment and trafficking in persons.

On Jan. 13, another 73 Filipinas from Syria arrived in the country. Of the 73, only eight were regular workers.

During the initial verification of their passports, it was found out that most of the women were holders of tampered passports. Ten women also admitted to using assumed identities.

“Some passports had substituted pages and photos, others had counterfeit border stamps,” Binay said.

The Philippines is a major labor-exporting nation with about 8.6 million skilled and unskilled workers scattered abroad, earning more than they could in the country where jobs are scarce and poverty is widespread.

The influx of many illegal Filipino workers in Syria despite an existing ban imposed by Manila since last year poses a huge challenge to its efforts to move them all out of the country as many of them are difficult to locate and their whereabouts or employers are unknown.

Of the estimated 10,000 Filipinos in Syria, at least 90 to 95 percent are undocumented, some entered the country on a tourist visa and subsequently found employment while there are other who arrive in Syria through the Philippines’ b ack corridors, paying exorbitant fees to human traffickers.

Majority of Filipinos in Syria are women, working as housemaids and earning an average of $150 a month.

During the interviews, Binay said, it was learned that all of them were maltreated by their employers.

Some were not able to receive the actual salaries promised to them, others were made to work for longer hours and victims of sexual, physical and verbal abuse, Binay said. –Michaela P. del Callar, Daily Tribune