Four Nepali women who worked as household help in Saudi Arabia have been locked up in jails after failing to provide the identities of the fathers of their newborns. According to Nepal’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia Udayraj Pandey, the women are between 25-35 years and have been jailed along with their babies. “Two of them have been in prison for two years while the other two have been imprisoned since the last eight months,” he said.
One of them is presently at a prison in Jeddah while the other three are at Nasing and Mallaj prison in Riyadh. All four women were arrested after they gave birth to their babies at local hospitals. “They couldn’t present complete details about their children’s father so they were arrested for further investigation,” said Pandey. “The law here is tough against women who fail to disclose the identity of the child’s father.”
The women told that the fathers were Bangladeshi and Indian men but failed to present full details which led to more problems, says ambassador Pandey. The Saudi government had requested the Nepal Embassy send the women back to Nepal with their babies but in the absence of the fathers, the embassy hasn’t been able to provide travel documents for the children.
Pandey said: “We have been in touch with the ministry of foreign affairs and home ministry regarding the travel documents and have begun the process to send them back home.”
According to Nepal’s citizenship act, travel documents cannot be issued to children of foreign fathers. The embassy has reportedly been receiving a lot of similar cases of babies born out of wedlock where the fathers are either unknown or are foreigners.
A Nepali woman who worked at a cleaning company in Qatar was also arrested on the same grounds after she was found to be five months pregnant at a routine check-up. She gave birth to her baby in prison. The embassy in Doha has issued her travel documents.
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