Allegations Saudi Ambassador to Germany Enslaved Indonesian Maid

The Jakarta Globe 

A German human rights group has publicly accused a Saudi diplomat in Berlin of treating the Indonesian maid he employed as a slave.

Her struggle is now the focus of an attempt to challenge diplomatic immunity in Germany and could place further pressures on the already strained relationship between Saudi Arabia and Indonesia.

Dewi Ratnasari, the 30-year-old maid, began working for the Saudi diplomat and his family in April of 2009. For the next year and a half, she worked 18-hour days, seven days a week and never received her monthly wage of 750 euros, the German Institute for Human Rights reported.

She told police she was “humiliated like a serf,” and that she was punched and regularly beaten with a stick by everyone in the diplomat’s family, including the five-year-old son.

The diplomat had confiscated her passport and Dewi (a pseudonym) spoke no German, so she had few options but to remain and work. But in October of 2010 she escaped and sought help from Ban Ying, a Berlin-based human rights association assisting migrant women from Southeast Asia, and the GIHR.

“The worst part is they never called her by her name, but by the Arabic word for ‘shit,’” Ban Ying’s Nivedita Prasad told Deutsche Welle.

Because of diplomatic immunity, which shields embassy employees from criminal prosecution and most civil suits, Dewi had no way to hold her employer accountable.

According to a GIHR report released this week, that protection makes exploitation widespread. Ban Ying said they see 5 to 10 cases of diplomatic domestic staff abuse in Berlin each year.

Earlier this month, Berlin’s Labor Court rejected her lawsuit, a criminal complaint of human trafficking and a claim on 70,000 euros in back wages, overtime, and compensation for suffering.

The Saudi diplomat’s lawyer, Philipp von Berg, denied the allegations, which he said could only be tried in Saudi Arabia.

The GIHR and Hamburg lawyer Klaus Berlsmann are now filing an appeal that would give exploited employees like Dewi, who has since returned to Indonesia, legal recourse by overturning diplomatic immunity in cases of human rights violations.

“Human rights are, also from the perspective of international law, a higher good than diplomatic immunity,” Berlsmann told the Daily Mail.

He is optimistic that the German higher court will follow the model set in France earlier this year, where the French government paid a woman from Oman employed by a UNESCO diplomat the 33,380 euros in back pay that France’s highest administrative court awarded.

It may take up to six months for the German higher court to issue a ruling on Dewi’s case, and the German Foreign Ministry told Deutsche Presse-Agenteur it is seeking a solution in the meantime.