He is scheduled to arrive in Dhaka today.

Apart from holding talks with Foreign Affairs and Expatriates' Welfare Adviser Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury, the UAE minister will exchange views with manpower businesses and visit universities and vocational institutes here.

This is the first time any UAE labour minister is visiting Bangladesh when a delegation of businessmen and industrialists will also accompany him, a foreign ministry source said.

"The joint committee will be consisted of at least three members from each of the two countries and will meet annually alternately in the UAE and Bangladesh to follow up the implementation of the issues to be incorporated in the MoU," a source in the Ministry of Expatriates' Welfare and Overseas Employment said.

Bangladeshi Ambassador to the UAE Nazimullah Chowdhury in a letter earlier said the MoU would develop a new system for recruitment of manpower based on coordination between the UAE and the labour sending country.

This will also help end the shady practice of fake contracts that exploit the workers, the ambassador said.

"Besides regulating the overseas manpower employment, the MoU will help open up a new era of cooperation between our two governments and strengthen bilateral relations of the two countries," he wrote.

"As per the MoU, the migration process and the job contracts between the workers and the UAE employers will be disciplined," an expatriates' welfare ministry official said.

The demand for workers from the UAE will state the required qualifications, define the nature of the jobs, duration of contracts and conditions, including salary, service benefits, medical facilities, leave entitlements and other facilities.

The contract shall specifically state the rights and obligations of the two sides in line with the provisions of the UAE labour laws and shall be authenticated by the UAE Ministry of Labour, the sources added.

In case of any dispute between the employers and the workers, complaint will be lodged with the department concerned of the UAE for amicable settlement, a source said, adding that in case of failure of any settlement, the complaint shall be referred to the judicial authorities.

Both the countries will exchange information on skills, training and share experiences, while the UAE will provide Bangladesh with necessary assistance including information technology, officials concerned noted.

The MoU is going to be signed at a time when there are reports of widespread violations of human rights of the migrant workers in the UAE, especially in that country's construction industry.

According to the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), these irregularities include unpaid or extremely low wages, several years of indebtedness to the recruitment agencies for paying up fees that UAE law says only the employers should pay, withholding of the workers' passports and hazardous working conditions that result in apparently high rates of death and injury.

Most of the UAE's 500,000 migrant construction workers come from South Asian countries, including Bangladesh, the report said.

The embassies of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh repatriated the bodies of 880 construction workers in 2004, the HRW said, adding that the UAE government can account for only a few of these deaths 'primarily because it appears not to enforce its own laws requiring employers to report worksite deaths and injuries.'

"Recruiting agencies unlawfully force the workers, rather than their employers, to pay $2,000-3,000 for travel, visas, government fees and the recruiters' own services," the report said, adding that the migrant workers do not benefit from the country's minimum wage, earning between $106-250 a month compared with a national average of $2,106, the HRW report said.

According to sources, there are over 1000 Bangladeshi workers languishing in different jails and over 16000 illegal Bangladeshis stay in the UAE where there are over five lakh Bangladeshi workers remitting about US$600 million annually.