KL’s plan to make foreign workers wear wristbands discriminatory
Say two rights groups
Two rights groups of Malaysia yesterday condemned the country's government for planning to make migrant workers wear wristbands under the pretext of containing Covid-19.
Tenaganita, a migrant rights group, and Lawyers for Liberty, a human rights lawyers' organisation, have termed the Malaysian government's move "discriminatory", reported The Star.
The Southeast Asian country is home to a large number of Bangladeshi migrant workers, regular and undocumented.
Tenaganita said compulsory wristbands would be discriminatory, reported The Star.
The NGO's Executive Director Glorene Das said that if all foreign workers were forced to wear wristbands in the country, it would be a clear "criminalisation of migrant workers".
"They are not criminals or animals to be tagged," she said when contacted by The Star yesterday.
Glorene's statement came after Malaysia's Security Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob's remark that the government is mulling whether to make it compulsory for all foreign workers to wear wristbands, The Star reported.
"We cannot prevent them from moving around and we cannot even differentiate between the faces of Bangladeshi workers, Myanmar workers and us.
"We are discussing whether there is a need for all foreign workers to wear wristbands so that we know when they are out," he told a press conference on Wednesday.
Lawyers for Liberty Coordinator Zaid Malek said the move would be discriminatory, when the focus should be on ensuring that their living quarters are spacious enough to accommodate them, The Star said in a separate report.
"The ramifications of migrant workers having to wear identifying wristbands are obviously and plainly catastrophic.
"This chilling suggestion essentially means that the government is legalising or formalising prejudicial profiling under the pretext of combating Covid-19.
"Not only will [migrant workers] be made easy targets for harassment by the authorities, they will also be susceptible to discrimination by the general public," he said in a statement.