BANGKOK
The Word Health Organization (WHO) will investigate its representative in Thailand following allegations that he and his wife treated a 24-year-old Ethiopian maid as a “slave,” local media reported Friday.
The WHO also hinted that it could lift the diplomatic immunity of Ethiopian national Dr. Yonas Tegegn if necessary to allow justice to proceed.
“Some immunities are granted to WHO staff members to facilitate the proper exercise of their functions. However, these immunities can be waived by the organization when they may impede the proper administration of justice,” the organization said in a statement released Thursday.
The young maid, known as “Annet” as her real name has not been made public, escaped from Tegegn’s house in a Bangkok suburb last month and filed complaints at a police station, accusing her employers of mistreatment.
The Lawyers Council of Thailand, who came to her aid, claimed at a press conference Wednesday that Annet was used as a “slave” by Tegegn and his wife, who detained and abused her.
An orphan from the Amhara group in Ethiopia, Annet was recruited through her uncle by the WHO official’s family in July 2013.
She had been promised a monthly salary of $92 and weekend holidays. She claims, however, that she has never been paid her wages and that the official only sent $250 to her uncle after her first five months of work.
She also said she worked from 5 a.m. to midnight every day of the week, and was deprived of her passport, regularly beaten by the official’s wife, and forced to sleep in a small room without a fan with the family’s large pet dog.
Since January, the military-run Thai government has launched a campaign to fight human trafficking and human rights abuses against migrant workers, following the kingdom’s downgrade to the lowest level in the U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report last year.
Most of the human rights abuses against migrant workers occur in the fishing industry, where Myanmar and Cambodian migrants are forced to work without payment under slave-like conditions on trawlers in international waters off the Gulf of Thailand.
While the issue of the mistreatment of domestic workers has sometimes made headlines in Thailand, it is less common than in neighboring Hong Kong and Malaysia.
