Dubai: One hundred Indian workers barred from leaving Bahrain for years are to be allowed to go home, their embassy and their former employer in the kingdom, Nass Corporation, said on Thursday.
“Nass has accepted the embassy’s request to lift the court-clamped travel ban on all the erstwhile workers who ran away from the company” shortly after arriving in the kingdom in 2006, a diplomat at the Indian Embassy told AFP.
Earlier this week, US-based rights group Avaaz said it had launched a campaign in June urging the company to return the stranded workers their passports after one of them committed suicide.
According to Avaaz, the workers fled the company after Nass offered them lower wages upon their arrival in Bahrain than those agreed upon in their employment contracts.
Nass Corporation “announced that it will immediately permit more than 100 migrant Indian labourers previously trapped in Bahrain to leave the country and return home”, Avaaz said in a statement.
The company also committed to a new “policy in which workers will no longer face travel bans and Nass will refrain from continuing or instituting legal actions against workers who leave their employ prior to the completion of their contracts”, it said.
On its website, the company said “it will withdraw all court cases pending against runaway workers.” The measure “would enable the affected Indian workers to leave Bahrain at the earliest”, it added.
But their departure still awaits the completion of court procedures to remove any obstacles preventing them from flying home, the diplomat said without saying how long such procedures could take.
Bahrain was the first Gulf country to discontinue the requirement for all foreign workers to be sponsored by a citizen, a system that has been strongly criticised by human rights watchdogs.
That system puts expatriates at a disadvantage in changing jobs without the approval of their sponsors and has even been exploited by some to sell work permits.
