Pravasi Legal Cell has filed a PIL urging the top court to direct the Centre to make necessary arrangements to bring them back home as they were living in vulnerable conditions.
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Prior Facts:
The PIL comes days after Bangladesh evacuated around 600 of the total 850 Bangladeshi Shia pilgrims from Iran where they had got stranded due to COVID19. Around 250 of them who had tested positive for the Coronavirus were not airlifted. The petition is filed through Advocate Jaikriti Jadeja.
Key Features:
- PIL has alleged that “over nine million Bangladeshis working in Gulf region were being denied COVID-19 testing and treatment in their host countries”, and therefore the directions should be given to the Centre for the evacuation of the citizens.
- The Plea stated that “international laws do not impede the Bangladeshi government from carrying out the evacuation in a phased manner”.
- It added that “it is the obligation on every country to evacuate its citizens from foreign jurisdictions amid a humanitarian crisis”.
- It added that evacuation of Bangladeshi citizens from COVID-19 hotspots such as Wuhan, Italy, or Iran and not from places like the USA is discriminatory given that the USA has now become one of the hotspots for the deadly virus.
- The petitioners also submitted that Sections 35 and 36 of the Disaster Management Act mandate for the government to evacuate all its citizens from foreign jurisdictions.
- The petition pointed out that Bangladesh brought back her citizens from other countries but didn’t make any effort to evacuate the stranded Bangladeshis from the gulf region.
- The PIL alleged that “as the host countries wanted to take care of their citizens first, the Bangladeshi migrant workers were not being given treatment even after many of them tested positive for COVID19”.
- The PIL stated that “The migrant workers in the Gulf countries are being denied treatment in hospitals even after testing positive for COVID-19 and are told to stay back in their house or camp itself. This is because the number of patients who are getting infected is going up, there is a shortage of beds in government hospitals”.
- It said as day to day their condition is worsening, in the absence of testing and treatment facilities, there was a high risk of COVID-19 transmission among migrant Bangladeshi workers as they lived in cramped conditions.
- The PIL demanded financial aid to those migrant workers in Gulf countries who lost their jobs due to the outbreak of COVID-19.
- The PIL sought directions to the Centre to ensure that adequate food, medicines, quarantine and emergency service facilities were made available to them Maintaining that the government was under constitutional obligation to protect these Bangladeshi migrant workers in this extraordinary time “which has threatened the very existence of the human race.
- A senior advocate Vibha Datta Makhija and advocate Kashish Aneja on Friday filed a separate PIL seeking a direction to the Centre to arrange special flights to airlift Bangladeshi citizens stranded in the US.
- They stated that “a blanket ban on international flights has put the Bangladeshi citizens in the US in great difficulty” while appreciating the government’s decision to impose a nationwide lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID19.
Edited by J. Madonna Jephi
Approved & Published – Sakshi Raje
