THE Kuwaiti government has set several conditions that the Philippine government needs to meet to resolve the impasse over the visa ban it issued on Filipino nationals, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) yesterday said.
DFA Undersecretary for Migrant Workers Eduardo Jose de Vega said the DFA is confident the “impasse or misunderstanding” between Manila and Kuwait will be resolved.
In an interview with CNN Philippines, De Vega said the Kuwaiti government has demanded, among others, that the the Philippines make a formal admission that embassy officials violated their sovereignty, laws, and the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations; apologize and commit that such violations will not be repeated; and hold accountable the officials responsible for the alleged violations.
De Vega said the Kuwaiti government was referring to several videotaped rescue operations carried out by Philippine embassy officials of distressed Filipino household workers that happened several years ago, which Kuwaiti authorities have repeatedly protested.
Likewise, the DFA official said the government of Kuwait has complained that embassy officials have supposedly been encouraging Filipino distressed workers to escape their employers.
De Vege said former DFA secretary and now Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano has already apologized to the Kuwaitis for the violations, which has resulted in the forging of a labor agreement between the two countries.
A statement issued by the Kuwaiti Ministry of the Interior and cited in a report published on state-owned Kuwait News Agency (KUNA) last Friday, said Manila’s alleged violations also included forcing employment offices in Kuwait to recall Filipino housemaids and workers from the houses of Kuwaiti citizens and lodging them at a private residence of the offices, forcing employment offices to locate escapees from Kuwaiti employers, and dealing inappropriately with Kuwaiti citizens by applying pressure on employers and offices while renewing work contracts.
The Kuwaiti interior ministry was also quoted as saying that the Philippine Embassy in the Arab country lodged supposed Filipino violators of residence laws in private shelters and camps belonging to the embassy, effectively barring Kuwaiti authorities from arresting or questionning them.
De Vega said the Philippine government’s position and one that President Marcos Jr. has made clear is that “we cannot apologize for protecting our workers.”
“We cannot hold our own people accountable for doing their job which is to protect our overseas nationals,” De Vega said.
Despite the Kuwaiti decision to withhold the issuance of any visa to Filipinos, De Vega said the DFA has no plans of reciprocating the act.
“The original intent always was for us to suspend the deployment of household workers. We did not intend to ban all types of deployment to Kuwait. It is not a country under Alert Level 4 due for example to a war or other situations, so hopefully, we will be able to resolve the current, should I say impasse or misunderstanding, among both countries, among friends. There will always be differences but the key is finding the solution,” De Vega said.
De Vega said another meeting between Filipino and Kuwaiti officials to resolve the issue will be held in July.
“It won’t be in June because of the summer month. We hope as early as July, we’ll go back to talking with them,” he said.
Kuwaiti and Philippine authorities held labor talks for two days which ended on May 17 without a clear decision on whether Kuwaiti authorities would lift the ban on the entry of Filipino workers to the oil-rich emirate.
