January 25, 2017

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Reference: Mic Catuira, Acting Secretary-General, 0943-4968763

OFWs mourn death of Jakatia Pawa:

Justice must be served, heads must roll!
As we mourn the death of our fellow OFW, we express our strongest condemnation on
the governments failure to save the life of Jakatia Pawa. The previous administrations
are guilty of criminal neglect and the current regime is liable of acting too late to stop
her execution.

This was the statement of Migrante International after Philippine post in Kuwait
confirmed the death of Jakatia Pawa, a domestic helper from Zamboanga del Norte who
was sentenced to death in April 2008 for allegedly killing the daughter of her employer.
The verdict was upheld by the Court of Cassation in 2013.

Her death is a result of the governments policy of not providing immediate legal
assistance to OFWs. We believe that she is not the culprit but the victim of a sorry
condition that forced her to work in a foreign land in order to provide a better future for
her children. We also believe that she will not have ended up on death row had the
Philippine government attended to her case sooner. The government must be held
accountable, lamented Mic Catuira, Acting Secretary General of Migrante International.

According to information gathered by Migrante, the knife that was used in the crime did
not have her fingerprints on it and there were no bloodstains of the victim on her dress
or body that could link her to the killing. Throughout the whole investigation and judicial
process, Pawa maintained that she was innocentThe governments failure to provide her
a lawyer in the early stages of trial made an unfavorable verdict possible.

Justice must be served, heads must roll! Nananawagan kami kay Pangulong Duterte na
imbestigahan ang kaso at sibakin sa pwesto ang mga nagpabayang opisyal, said
Catuira.

Migrante also challenged President Duterte to immediately call for a review of RA 8042
as ammended by RA 10022 as it does not guarantee the welfare and security of overseas
Filipino workers just like what happened to OFW Pawa. According to Migrantes
monitoring, almost 100 OFWs are currently on deathrow and more than 9,000 are in
detention, many of those are not provided legal assistance from our government.

To save the OFWs from the perils of forced migration, what the present administration
should ultimately strive to do is to decisively deviate from its 4-decade old labor export
policy and focus instead on creating decent and sustainable local jobs for its citizens.
ended Catuira.###