Manila – Sen. Joel Villanueva urged the government to seek justice for the murder of Filipina household worker Jeanelyn Villavende in Kuwait.
Villanueva on Friday called on concerned Philippine authorities “to pursue all available legal means to ensure her family attains justice they rightly deserve.”
“We call for justice into her senseless death,” he added. “It is already bad enough that she has to leave her family behind to work in a foreign land to give her loved ones a better opportunity.”
Villanueva, chairman of the Senate Committee on Labor, questioned the implementation of the bilateral agreement between the two countries signed in 2018 that was supposed to protect overseas Filipino workers (OFW) in Kuwait.
“We all thought that when the government entered into the bilateral labor agreement, our workers there would have better protection against all forms of abuse, effectively stopping the senseless deaths of our OFWs at the hands of their employers,” he said.
“The labor department should reach out to their counterparts in Kuwait and see how justice may be achieved for our ‘kababayan’ and their bereaved family,” Villanueva added.
“We hope that the labor department would continue to make representations with the Kuwaiti Ministry of Labor and work on a system to educate employers on the rights of their household service workers,” he said.
Based on the initial information from the Philippine Overseas Labor Office in Kuwait, Villavende was allegedly maltreated to death by her female employer.
In response, the Department of Labor and Employment has implemented a partial deployment ban for first-time domestic workers./PN
