A/HRC/44/40/Add.1 61. Women, who made up an estimated 20 per cent of migrant workers in 2016, have been particularly abandoned. 92 They are often employed as domestic workers and are vulnerable to exploitation because they work in isolation in private homes without regular monitoring and because a carve-out in the Employment Act 1955 excludes them from basic protections, such as leave days, medical coverage or restrictions on their working hours.93 Defending this carve-out, officials pointed to voluntary guidelines and, shockingly, reported that between 2014 and 2018, they had carried out only five prosecutions against employers for violations of the rights of domestic workers.94 In its response to the Special Rapporteur, the Government inexplicably asserted that inspection of the labour conditions of domestic workers was “impossible”. 62. Migrant workers are also excluded from many social services. Although those with legal status can in theory access public health care, they must pay a “foreigner” rate at public facilities, up to 40 times what a Malaysian citizen pays. Irregular migrant workers avoid public health-care facilities altogether because of document checks and the potential involvement of the immigration authorities. 95 The Government confirmed that undocumented people receiving treatment would subsequently be detained and deported. The children of migrant workers face a difficult existence and are generally unable to enrol in public schools. According to the Global Detention Project, 885 children were detained in immigration detention in 2017 out of an estimated total of 47,092 immigrant detainees.96 63. Non-citizen spouses in Malaysia are in a precarious situation. They face many challenges in accessing employment and are completely dependent on their spouses to maintain their legal status and authorization to work, a situation that the authorities often allow to persist for decades.97 Spouses said that barriers to employment forced some of them to work in the informal sector, making them vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, while divorced or widowed spouses are mostly given short-term visas without the right to work. 64. Migrant workers make up a sizeable part of the overall population and have been central to the country’s economic success. Yet they have deliberately been left in a regulatory grey zone that facilitates sometimes scandalous abuses and generally poor conditions. The time has come for the Government to acknowledge their existence, role and vulnerability in its policymaking. It should start with a rigorous estimate of the total population of migrant workers and migrants and include them in poverty statistics. The Government should also rapidly enhance the enforcement of labour protections, ensure migrant workers can assert their rights without fear of deportation and extend standard employment protections to domestic workers. It should engage more substantively with countries of origin to ensure the establishment of safe corridors and the elimination of exorbitant recruitment fees, and it should reverse the policy of excluding migrant workers from social services. 65. The Malaysian economy would in fact be better off if migrant workers, both documented and undocumented, were able to access affordable health care without fear of deportation and if the Government were to expand existing efforts to enrol stateless children in public schools, regardless of immigration status. Finally, the Government should adopt major international instruments pertaining to the rights of migrant workers 92 93 94 95 96 97 14 See, for example, Wei San Loh and others, “Malaysia: estimating the number of foreign workers”, p. 20. S. Indramalar, “Domestic workers continue to be abused until tougher laws can protect them”, The Star, 6 April 2018. Information from a meeting with representatives of the Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of Human Resources, 21 August 2019. Tharani Loganathan and others, “Breaking down the barriers: understanding migrant workers’ access to healthcare in Malaysia”, Public Library of Science One (July 2019), pp. 3–10. While there is a system to provide insurance for documented migrant workers in limited circumstances, SPIKPA, it has significant gaps. Global Detention Project, “Malaysia immigration detention”, quick facts. National Human Rights Commission of Malaysia, Annual Report 2018, p. 109.