Bello confident ASEAN nations will comply with 'landmark' pro-migrant workers accord



Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III on Wednesday expressed confidence that the labor accord on the protection of migrant workers signed by ASEAN leaders on Tuesday night will not be a mere scrap of paper.
Interviewed on News To Go, Bello said he believes that even if the accord is not legally binding, ASEAN member countries will still heed its provisions, which include, among others, allowing migrant workers to join unions and prohibiting employers from confiscating their workers' passports.
"Hindi ka naman pipirma for the sake of signing, but you will sign with the intention na you will comply with the provision that you are going to sign," he said.
The ASEAN Consensus on the Protection and Promotion of Rights of Migrant Workers, Bello said, can be a way of forging bilateral agreements between each ASEAN nation to give the accord more teeth.
"When you sign that agreement and it involves the promotion of the welfare and the protection of the OFWs or the migrant workers, you will have every reason to count on a bilateral agreement between the countries," Bello said.
"Legally binding"
Bello said he had to meet with the Indonesian labor ministry to leave out the terms "legally-binding" and "morally-binding" in the consensus.
"I had to fly to Indonesia for the purpose of convincing the Minister of Labor, in fact I was with him this morning, to agree to 'yung aking formulation na 'morally-binding.' We ended up in agreeing to a formulation na wag na lang sabihin na legally-binding o morally-binding," he said.
Bello noted that the Philippines and Indonesia wanted to have a legally-binding accord when ASEAN adopted the Declaration on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Migrant Workers when the Philippines had chairmanship in 2007.
He added several ASEAN countries — Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Brunei — do not want the accord to have a legally-binding effect. 
"'Di ko sasabihin sa inyo kung ano ang dahilan. That was the reason why they were never able to arrive at a consensus," Bello said.
While lauded by some sectors, some critics and civil groups view the consensus as "simply an expression of intention" as any of the ASEAN's 10 member states can opt out of it because of its non legally-binding nature.
Bello said migrant workers, especially OFWs, still have legal recourse to settle their labor problems.
"They are forgetting na meron tayong mga people from DFA and people from POLO, ito yung Philippine Overseas Labor Offce, who are taking care of the interest and the welfare of our overseas workers. Hindi natin pinapabayaan sila," Bello said.
According to GMA News Research and the Department of Foreign Affairs, there were 863,040 Filipinos in different ASEAN countries in 2016. The POEA said more than 20,000 of these were OFWs.
As of 2016 there were 23,000 Filipinos in Brunei, 5,557 in Cambodia, 10,455 in Indonesia, 1,523 in Laos, 620,043 in Malaysia, 1,044 in Myanmar, 180,000 in Singapore, 17,618 in Thailand, and 3,800 in Vietnam. —Rie Takumi/KBK, GMA News

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