Kuwait's appeals court on Wednesday upheld the death sentence of a policeman for "abducting, raping and attempting to murder" a Filipina woman.
The lower court condemned the policeman, identified only by the initials Y.M, to death last June. He can still challenge the ruling before the supreme court.
The policeman had arrested the woman after finding that her residence permit had expired, according to the court papers.
He took her to a deserted area where he stabbed her in the neck and raped her after she refused to have sex with him.
The policeman left her for dead in a pool of blood, but returned and stabbed her several more times when she moved.
The Filipina survived and crawled to a nearby road where a passerby took her to hospital.
In November, 90 international rights and labor groups called for urgent action to protect migrant workers from abuse in Gulf countries.
In a statement, they said millions of Asian and African workers are facing abuses including unpaid wages, confiscation of passports, physical violence and forced labor.
"Whether it's the scale of abuse of domestic workers hidden from public view or the shocking death toll among construction workers, the plight of migrants in the Gulf demands urgent and profound reform," said Rothna Begum, Middle East women's rights researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch.
About 23 million foreigners, including at least 2.4 million domestic workers, live in the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) that brings together Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
An estimated 180,000 Filipinos, many of them women employed as domestic workers, work and live in oil-rich Kuwait, making up the fourth largest foreign community in the Gulf emirate.
As a Human Rights Watch report in 2012 noted, migrant workers in Kuwait “comprise 80 percent of the country’s workforce.”
On June 7, a Kuwaiti Instagram account called Mn7asha (loosely translated as “Runaways”) was launched. The purpose of the account was to provide a platform that allows Kuwaiti citizens to upload pictures and IDs of domestic workers who had run away so others can hunt them down.
The account was but a symptom of the larger issue of Kuwaiti citizens’ treatment of expatriate workers and the ‘kafala’ sponsorship system, which leaves foreign workers vulnerable to abuse by their employers.
