By Jennifer Pak
BBC News, Kuala Lumpur
**Migrant workers in Malaysia are being exploited by both employers and police, Amnesty International says.**It says its report is the first to document how widespread the abuses are.
It says migrants are often forced into labour or exploited in other ways, including the practice of employers often confiscating their passports.
About one in five workers in Malaysia is a migrant. The Malaysian government has said it will increase checks on workplaces that rely on foreign help.
Permits cancelled
Every year, thousands of people from Bangladesh, Indonesia and elsewhere in the region are lured to Malaysia by the promise of good money.
If migrants decide to run away from abuse, they become illegal in Malaysia.
“Almost 70% of those who came for assistance were forced to return (to their own countries) without getting any form of redress,” said Irene Fernandez, executive director of Tenaganita, a Malaysian women’s and migrant rights group
“The reason is because the moment they leave their work premises, the work permit is cancelled. And therefore the migrant worker loses his legal status in the country and thus is open to arrest and detention,” said Ms Fernandez.
She said that 5,000 of the 5,315 cases her group handled last year were related to unpaid wages and unfair dismissal.
“You can then recognise how embedded and entrenched exploitation is in this country,” she said.
If caught, the criminal penalties range from fines and imprisonment to caning.
Michael Bochenek, who wrote the report for Amnesty International, said some of the abuses were directly committed by the civilian volunteer force and police.
Vulnerable
“These are acts of harassment, of petty extortion frankly, of robbery, of targeting of migrant workers and of refugees for small sums of money and for goods like hand phones,” he said.
Mr Bochenek said exploitation of migrants in Malaysia was widespread, occurring in all sectors that relied on foreign workers, such as the construction and oil palm plantation industries.
But domestic workers like maids are the most vulnerable because they are almost always excluded from the protection of existing labour laws.
Amnesty International is calling on the Malaysian government to close loopholes that allow exploitation of migrant workers to continue.
There are an estimated two million foreign workers in Malaysia.