"Tamkeen: Arrest Campaigns by the Ministries of Labor and Interior are random and illegal"

... The Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of Interior issued a joint statement in July 2023 stating that intensive security and inspection campaigns will be carried out on violating expatriate workers in the Jordanian labor market, who do not hold valid work permits or residence permits, work in professions other than those authorized or work for an employer for whom they are not authorized to work.

“Joelle,” a Filipino national, told Tamkeen that while she was walking in the market, the police stopped her and asked her for her documents. She gave them the family book and her passport, noting in her speech that she is married to a Jordanian, and she added that despite giving the papers and documents to the people who seized her, no one looked at the papers or checked the information contained therein before transporting her to the station.

“Joelle” says that while she was in the car in which those who were caught were being transported, there were many girls of non-Jordanian nationalities screaming and crying because they did nothing wrong, and "we were not allowed to contact anyone, if I had not managed to quickly contact my husband [before they noticed and confiscated her phone], nobody would know where I was".

Many other workers, like “Joelle,” were detained without any legal justification. Another employer... says, “I have a domestic worker who has been in Jordan for 9 years... all her papers are legal and valid... on her last day off, she left the house and did not carry her work permit or her passport on her, but she had a photo of them on the phone... an hour after she left, she called my phone and told me that the labor office and the police had caught her, and when I asked her to give me the person to talk to, he refused to talk to me, and refused to see the residency and passport on her phone."

Another one of the employers... said: “I have a Filipino domestic worker who is at home to take care of a member of my family, a disabled woman who cannot even drink water... She left the house to send money to her children, a 5-minute walk from the house, when she was arrested... I went to the security center with her passport and residence permit. But they refused to release her, as happened with other employers who were present to release their workers... I do not know how a woman was arrested for two days, and she never did anything.”

Kalash [Director of Tamkeen], stated: “We are with regulating the presence of expatriate workers in Jordan, but not doing so with randomness and injustice to people, including female workers...

Kalash called on the authorities concerned with the inspection to work with dye diligence and not only arrest persons according to their skin color, or origin, as the migrant worker has the right to go out on the street at any time... Moreover, the reasons for the workers’ violation are the failure to obtain work permits and residence permits, which are among the duties of the employer. In addition to that, Article 3 of the Labor Inspectors Regulation of 1996 and its amendments, the objective of the inspection is to verify the application of legal provisions in the working condition and protect workers in the course of doing their job and not during their presence outside working hours on the public street...

[Unofficial Arabic-English translation provided by Business & Human Rights Resource Centre]