On the 12th of July, in Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia, a woman accused of murder was condemned to death. This would be nothing new in a country where 50 death sentences were carried out in 2003 alone (according to data supplied by Amnesty International). The oddity in this trial is that the defendant is a woman from Sri Lanka, therefore a foreign citizen who was in the country to work.

In this case, the woman worked as a maid for a family and the victim is her employer. The defendant, according to the account given by the public attorney’s office, allegedly let an acquaintance, who is also from Sri Lanka, into the house where she worked, to burgle it. Since the woman who owned the house would not hand over the family’s valuables, the couple lost their heads, the man strangled the lady and escaped with his accomplice. The two were subsequently captured and during the trial the woman was considered responsible for the crime for having urged her partner to commit murder and she was thus judged by Quranic law, Sharia. The Minister of the Interior of Saudi Arabia has not said if the execution will take place by stoning, beheading or firing squad.

So far it seems like a rather run-of-the-mill crime which is punished by death in other countries besides Saudi Arabia. Except for the fact that, at the same time, and specifically on the 15th of July, 2004, Human Rights Watch, the US association that fights for the respect of human rights, published a report with a very explicit title: Bad dreams: exploitation and abuse of migrant workers in Saudi Arabia. A 135-page report that shows how, according to HRW, the treatment of foreign workers, in the country of the Saud, is an example of exploitation and violation of the rights of those workers who travel to the richest land in the Middle East in search of a better life.

The Sri Lankan woman’s trial does not have much to do with worker exploitation, but the report particularly emphasizes the violations of migrants’ rights before the Saudi judiciary. HRW explicitly mentions unfair trials, forced confessions and torture of foreign workers who are now a third of the entire population in Saudi Arabia.

The association denounces cases of defendants who were executed without their family or their embassy being informed before the execution took place. Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of HRW for the Middle East and Northern Africa, complains that "abuse against foreign workers in the kingdom of Saud is a terrible distortion of criminal justice. If the government of Saudi Arabia is serious when it talks of reforms, that is an excellent place to start.".

HRW says that last year the Saudi government invited a team of observers from the US association for official talks, but the report emphasizes that the group was not allowed to carry out accurate field investigations, including meeting with the victims of the alleged abuse. It is not by chance, says HRW, "that most of the interviews the document is based on, took place in India, Bangladesh and in the Philippines, with workers who recently returned from Saudi Arabia."

"We found men and women in conditions similar to slavery", says Ms. Whitson, "one case after another, that show how the Saudi judiciary turns a blind eye to the abuse against foreign workers in Saudi Arabia, a country that has so far been unable to create an acceptable labor legislation, especially as regards women.".

One example mentioned in the document is that of 300 women from Sri Lanka, the Philippines and India, who worked as attendants in the Jeddah hospital, on average 12 hours a day, six days a week. At the end of the day they went back to a common dormitory with 14-bed rooms, where they slept on benches. The doors were locked from the outside. They were treated this way for three years, the length of their contract.

A de facto imprisonment which is probably less hard than life in the Saudi jails. "In a prison in Riyadh", Ms. Whitson says, "we found women arrested for ‘illegal pregnancies’, meaning extra-conjugal. Sexual abuse in such situations is the norm, just like outside the prisons. For sexual abuse that goes as far as the kidnapping of foreign women workers, the perpetrators are not even prosecuted.".

The foreign worker community in Saudi Arabia is made up of more than 8 million people. They come from Sudan, Egypt, the Philippines, from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, looking for work in one of the few countries in  the Middle East that can offer a job and the hope of a future less grim than what they would find in their own countries.

These people probably prefer to emigrate to Saudi Arabia, without going all the way to one of the Western countries, consoled, perhaps, by the idea of a more welcoming society, with customs more similar to their own. All too often, they find the hangman waiting.