MANILA: The Philippine president said Thursday that a ban on the deployment of workers to Kuwait, where a Filipino was found dead in a freezer, will continue and could be expanded to other countries where Filipino workers suffer “human degradation.”
President Rodrigo Duterte made the remarks after attending the wake of Joanna Demafelis in the central Philippine town of Sara. He said he intends to file criminal charges against her employers, who are being hunted by Kuwaiti authorities.
Demafelis’s body was found stuffed in a food freezer on Feb. 6 in a Kuwait City apartment where it had reportedly been kept for more than a year. Duterte has said her body bore torture marks and there were indications she was strangled.
“The ban stays, no deployment of Filipinos whatsoever in Kuwait,” Duterte said outside the wake, where steamers and shirts worn by mourners bore messages demanding justice for the maid’s death. The ban applies only to new Kuwait-bound workers and the thousands already there, mostly maids, can continue working.
Duterte said the government is conducting an assessment to “find out the places where we deploy Filipinos and our countrymen suffer brutal treatment and human degradation.”
Her death is the latest overseas tragedy to befall workers from the Philippines, a major labor exporter with about a tenth of its more than 100 million people working abroad. The workers have been called the country’s heroes because the income they send home has propped up the Southeast Asian nation’s economy for decades, accounting for about 10 percent of its annual gross domestic product.
Duterte talked with the family of Demafelis and then briefly viewed her remains, gently touching her coffin with his hand.
Philippine officials are under increasing pressure to do more to monitor the safety of the country’s worldwide diaspora of mostly maids, construction workers and laborers.
Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III told a Senate hearing Wednesday that he has recalled three Filipino labor officers from Kuwait to face an investigation. They failed to act on a request by Demafelis’s family for help after she went missing in January last year, he said.
Administrator Hans Leo Cacdac of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration reported that at least 196 Filipinos had died in Kuwait in the last two years, mostly for unspecified medical reasons but also four who committed suicide. That prompted senators to ask why labor officials did not immediately order a ban on the deployment of workers to Kuwait with the spike in deaths.
A Philippine labor delegation left for Kuwait on Thursday to seek better protection for Filipino workers that may prompt the Duterte administration to lift its ban, officials said.
They will demand a stop to the practice of many Kuwaiti employers to hold on to the passports, travel papers and cellphones of Filipino maids, which has prevented them from reporting abuses and calling for help, the officials said.
Kuwait’s ruling emir has reportedly invited Duterte to his country next month to resolve the labor issues but Duterte has not said whether he will visit.
The sheer number of Filipino workers abroad makes monitoring their wellbeing an overwhelming task. That is often complicated by workers not having proper travel and work documents, such as in Kuwait, where nearly 11,000 of the more than 252,000 Filipino workers are in the country illegally or are not properly authorized.
Many desperate Filipinos have also chosen to stay in countries where the Philippines has banned Filipinos in the past, such as in war-torn Iraq and Syria.
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Philippine labor ban to Kuwait stays, may be expanded, says Duterte
Philippine labor ban to Kuwait stays, may be expanded, says Duterte
Trump has ‘productive’ talks with Putin before Zelensky meet
- Trump’s upbeat tone on peace deal comes after Russia carried out another massive bombardment of Kyiv
- US president due to meet Zelensky at his Mar-a-Lago estate today
PALM BEACH: Donald Trump said Sunday he had “productive” talks with Russian leader Vladimir Putin hours before the US president meets Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, in a year-end sprint to seal a deal to end the war.
Trump’s renewed upbeat tone comes despite wide skepticism in Europe about Putin’s intentions after Russia carried out another massive bombardment of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv just as Zelensky was heading to Trump’s Florida estate.
“I just had a very good and productive telephone call with President Putin of Russia,” Trump announced on his Truth Social platform.
The Kremlin gave a more pointed readout, saying that Trump agreed that a mere ceasefire “would only prolong the conflict” as it demanded Ukraine compromise on territory.
Trump is meeting Zelensky in the dining room of his Mar-a-Lago estate, where he frequently brings both foreign guests and domestic supporters.
Trump has made ending the Ukraine war a centerpiece of his second term as a self-proclaimed “president of peace,” and he has repeatedly blamed both Kyiv and Moscow for the failure to secure a ceasefire.
Zelensky, who has faced verbal attacks from Trump, has sought to show willingness to work with the contours of the US leader’s plans, but Putin has offered no sign that he will accept it.
Sunday’s meeting will be Trump’s first in-person encounter with Zelensky since October, when the US president refused to grant his request for long-range Tomahawk missiles.
And the Ukrainian leader could face another hard sell this time around, with Trump insisting that he “doesn’t have anything until I approve it.”
- European allies -
The talks are expected to last an hour, after which the two presidents are scheduled to hold a joint call with the leaders of key European allies.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who will join the call, wrote on X that the Russian attacks on Kyiv were “contrary to President Trump’s expectations and despite the readiness to make compromises” by Zelensky.
The revised peace plan, which emerged from weeks of intense US-Ukraine negotiations, would stop the war along its current front lines and could require Ukraine to pull troops back from the east, allowing the creation of demilitarized buffer zones.
As such, it contains Kyiv’s most explicit acknowledgement yet of possible territorial concessions.
It does not, however, envisage Ukraine withdrawing from the 20 percent of the eastern Donetsk region that it still controls — Russia’s main territorial demand.
The Ukrainian leader said he hoped the talks in Florida would be “very constructive” but stressed that Putin had shown his hand with a deadly drone and missile assault on Kyiv that temporarily knocked out power and heating to hundreds of thousands of residents during freezing temperatures.
“This attack is again Russia’s answer on our peace efforts. And this really showed that Putin doesn’t want peace,” he said as he visited Canada.
He also told reporters that he would press Trump on the importance of providing security guarantees that would prevent any renewed Russian aggression if a ceasefire were secured.
“We need strong security guarantees. We will discuss this and we will discuss the terms,” he said.
Ukraine insists it needs more European and US funding and weapons — especially drones.
- Russian opposition -
Russia has accused Ukraine and its European backers of trying to “torpedo” a previous US-brokered plan to stop the fighting, and recent battlefield gains — Russia announced on Saturday it had captured two more towns in eastern Ukraine — are seen as strengthening Moscow’s hand when it comes to peace talks.
“If the authorities in Kyiv don’t want to settle this business peacefully, we’ll resolve all the problems before us by military means,” Putin said on Saturday.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told state news agency TASS that Moscow would continue its engagement with US negotiators but criticized European governments as the “main obstacle” to peace.
“They are making no secret of their plans to prepare for war with Russia,” Lavrov said, adding that the ambitions of European politicians are “literally blinding them.”
Trump’s renewed upbeat tone comes despite wide skepticism in Europe about Putin’s intentions after Russia carried out another massive bombardment of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv just as Zelensky was heading to Trump’s Florida estate.
“I just had a very good and productive telephone call with President Putin of Russia,” Trump announced on his Truth Social platform.
The Kremlin gave a more pointed readout, saying that Trump agreed that a mere ceasefire “would only prolong the conflict” as it demanded Ukraine compromise on territory.
Trump is meeting Zelensky in the dining room of his Mar-a-Lago estate, where he frequently brings both foreign guests and domestic supporters.
Trump has made ending the Ukraine war a centerpiece of his second term as a self-proclaimed “president of peace,” and he has repeatedly blamed both Kyiv and Moscow for the failure to secure a ceasefire.
Zelensky, who has faced verbal attacks from Trump, has sought to show willingness to work with the contours of the US leader’s plans, but Putin has offered no sign that he will accept it.
Sunday’s meeting will be Trump’s first in-person encounter with Zelensky since October, when the US president refused to grant his request for long-range Tomahawk missiles.
And the Ukrainian leader could face another hard sell this time around, with Trump insisting that he “doesn’t have anything until I approve it.”
- European allies -
The talks are expected to last an hour, after which the two presidents are scheduled to hold a joint call with the leaders of key European allies.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who will join the call, wrote on X that the Russian attacks on Kyiv were “contrary to President Trump’s expectations and despite the readiness to make compromises” by Zelensky.
The revised peace plan, which emerged from weeks of intense US-Ukraine negotiations, would stop the war along its current front lines and could require Ukraine to pull troops back from the east, allowing the creation of demilitarized buffer zones.
As such, it contains Kyiv’s most explicit acknowledgement yet of possible territorial concessions.
It does not, however, envisage Ukraine withdrawing from the 20 percent of the eastern Donetsk region that it still controls — Russia’s main territorial demand.
The Ukrainian leader said he hoped the talks in Florida would be “very constructive” but stressed that Putin had shown his hand with a deadly drone and missile assault on Kyiv that temporarily knocked out power and heating to hundreds of thousands of residents during freezing temperatures.
“This attack is again Russia’s answer on our peace efforts. And this really showed that Putin doesn’t want peace,” he said as he visited Canada.
He also told reporters that he would press Trump on the importance of providing security guarantees that would prevent any renewed Russian aggression if a ceasefire were secured.
“We need strong security guarantees. We will discuss this and we will discuss the terms,” he said.
Ukraine insists it needs more European and US funding and weapons — especially drones.
- Russian opposition -
Russia has accused Ukraine and its European backers of trying to “torpedo” a previous US-brokered plan to stop the fighting, and recent battlefield gains — Russia announced on Saturday it had captured two more towns in eastern Ukraine — are seen as strengthening Moscow’s hand when it comes to peace talks.
“If the authorities in Kyiv don’t want to settle this business peacefully, we’ll resolve all the problems before us by military means,” Putin said on Saturday.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told state news agency TASS that Moscow would continue its engagement with US negotiators but criticized European governments as the “main obstacle” to peace.
“They are making no secret of their plans to prepare for war with Russia,” Lavrov said, adding that the ambitions of European politicians are “literally blinding them.”
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