A permanent maid moratorium: The death penalty in the Middle East and female migrant workers from Indonesia

In June 2011, Ruyati Binti Satubi, a 54-year-old grandmother of seven from the small village of Sukadarma in West Java, Indonesia, was executed by beheading in Saudi Arabia. She had worked overseas as a domestic worker for 10 years in order to fund her grandchildren’s education, and was almost ready to retire when she had taken one last job in the country. However, her employer there withheld seven months’ salary and refused to let her return home. She is believed to have been tortured and abused before killing her employer, most likely in self-defence. She was arrested, charged and sentenced to death. There are scant details from the trial; it is unclear whether she had a lawyer, and the Indonesian embassy was not consulted until after her execution.

Ruyati's case sparked outrage on the part of the Indonesian government and a moratorium was announced on sending ‘informal’ Indonesian migrant workers to Saudi Arabia. In effect this prevented mainly women migrants from obtaining permission to travel to Saudia Arabia, especially to work in a domestic or unregulated setting, for example as a maid in a private household. Another travel ban on female workers – covering an additional 20, mainly Middle Eastern, states – was imposed in 2015 following the executions of two further Indonesian women in Saudi Arabia, Karni Tarsim and Siti Zainab. The Indonesian Manpower Minister stated at the time that: “the government has the right to stop the placement of migrant workers… if it is believed that their employment degrades human values and the dignity of the nation.” Although it was announced in March 2025 that after over 10 years the ban would be lifted in relation to Saudi Arabia only, by June 2025, it remains in place for the rest of the countries affected. 

Existing research has examined travel bans as a result of the abuse of migrant workers,[1] but we set out to analyse them in relation to capital punishment, relying on the Death Penalty Research Unit’s (DPRU) mapping project of foreign nationals on death row, as well as qualitative interviews with migrant rights activists in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2023 (many of whom are also former migrant workers themselves). Focusing on female migrant workers travelling to the Middle East from Indonesia, we discovered that these travel ban policies reveal paternalistic attitudes towards gendered labour and ideas of ‘dignity’. Moreover, we found that that the bans are ineffective, and in fact render workers more vulnerable to trafficking and abuse, fundamentally failing to address the vulnerability of migrant workers to execution overseas.

Across Southeast Asia, female migrant workers make up just over 50% of current total outgoing migrants; at least 1.5 million of whom are from Indonesia. Restrictions on women's overseas employment have existed in Asia since the 1970s and 1980s, and executions of female migrant domestic workers in countries such as Singapore, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East have led to migration bans from the mid-1990s onwards. Indonesia is the second-highest Southeast Asian sending state to the Middle East, after the Philippines, and our mapping research found it had the highest number of women sentenced to death in the Middle East from any Asian country. This provides a case study on attitudes to the criminalisation of female migrant workers from across the region, from which trends can be applied elsewhere. 

While the Indonesian government has been quick to impose moratoria on female migration in response to executions of domestic workers for homicide abroad, their silence when it comes to female migrants sentenced to death or executed at home and abroad for drug trafficking suggests these bans are instead motivated by gendered and paternalistic concerns of women’s purity and blameworthiness. This is because while those who are sentenced to death for homicide in the Middle East after defending against sexual or other violence clearly inhabit the category of ‘victim’, those who were sentenced to death for drug offences, given the region’s strict stance on drugs, are not as clearly labelled as ‘victims’ in need of paternalistic interventions. Many national leaders across South and Southeast Asia state publicly that these bans are in place to salvage national dignity, lost through women working abroad as domestic workers and their abuse seen as a national humiliation.

Many women migrant workers consider the chance to work abroad as a necessary – and sometimes the only – economic option available to them, as well as a personal opportunity to travel, to avoid early marriage or abusive and/or unwanted relationships. Such travel bans and restrictions are in contravention of many international conventions, which state that the right to leave one's country is a human right.

These migration bans, while ostensibly designed to protect migrant workers, in fact, leave them in more precarious situations and increase their vulnerability to human trafficking and abuse as undocumented workers. Bans are often inconsistent with policies in countries of destination, are not well communicated, and migrants themselves may not even be aware of the restrictions. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that the bans have not reduced the number of women migrating, even to banned countries. If these women run into difficulties while working abroad however, they are often unable to receive help due to their unregulated status. If the goal of bans and restrictions on women's migration to the Middle East is to reduce the number of domestic workers who are abused and sentenced to death, this is not ultimately achieved by the policy, which serves merely as symbolic gender politics.[2] Indeed, our mapping project found that there were 62 foreign national women under sentence of death in Middle Eastern jurisdictions between 2016 and 2021. When travel bans are imposed, the host states will look to outsource female labour from other countries, such as Ethiopia, which have even less bargaining power and protection for their workers in the region, and hence we have documented 11 cases of Ethiopian women sentenced to death in the Middle East during this same period.

While the execution of Ruyati Binti Satubi was described as a ‘turning point’ by our interviewees and exemplified the nexus between the death penalty and violence against women, some questioned why the similar case of the abuse and execution of Zaini Misrin, a male Indonesian migrant worker in Saudi Arabia, did not have the same response. We found that what makes the women's cases especially egregious in the eyes of the state is the sexual violence involved, which is seen to undermine national dignity. The Chairman of the Indonesian House of Representatives, Marzuki Alie, remarked in 2011 that sending women overseas for domestic work was a “national embarrassment.” The corporeal nature of both the abuse that these migrant workers have faced abroad, as well as the capital punishment, is what offends the dignity of the nation.

However, such comments, spoken in public forums and repeated in the press, reinforce the idea that domestic work itself is considered shameful and those who do such work need to be hidden and restricted. Therefore, some activists we interviewed considered that these travel bans serve a dual purpose as a way to reduce this sector. As our interviewees made clear, these executions of migrant domestic workers solidify Indonesia's status on the world stage as a ‘country of helpers,’ especially so in countries such as Saudi Arabia, where the Indonesian public believe their migrant workers are treated as ‘slaves’. There could also be a link to religious factors: for example, in 2005 the Council of Indonesian Ulama announced a religious decree stating that women's migration abroad for work is un-Islamic. There is still a strong preference for migration to Islamic countries due to the perceived shared connection and the ability to enter Saudi Arabia using a religious Umrah visa to visit Mecca. 

All of these factors serve to prevent Indonesia from using the time during a migration ban from advocating for better working and justice conditions for their citizens. As one participant bemoaned: “the government has not used the moratorium time to negotiate with the Saudi government nor to evaluate the policy.” In this case, although the Indonesian government recently announced its intention to lift the travel ban to Saudi Arabia, and the Indonesian Minister for Migrant Worker Protection, Abdul Kadir Karding, stated that “labour protections have significantly improved,” our interviewees expressed concerns that there have been no concrete steps taken to improve the management and protection of migrant workers and that any protections proposed may fail to reach domestic workers employed in private households. As one stated, “some agree with a temporary moratorium but not a permanent one.” 

Indeed, the planned lifting of the ban in relation to Saudi Arabia does not seem to have been precipitated by a successful negotiation of increased workers’ rights and protections, but was brought about by Saudi Arabia's need for labour coupled with the effect of remittances on the Indonesian economy. As Karding remarked: “[The] President has ordered us to revoke the moratorium as soon as possible, since the opportunity is enormous. The foreign exchange that can be expected from remittances from the workers is Rp31 trillion [£1.4 billion].” Wayhu Susilo, the Director of Migrant Care, stated that Indonesia's bargaining power is low and thus the new arrangements may not prove to be beneficial for new migrants, and suggested Indonesia should instead focus its efforts on finding new countries of employment for would-be migrants “because creating an MoU… with Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East has never been successful.”

Therefore, while the migration bans show the Indonesian government seeking to appease public opinion and to be seen to be ‘protecting’ these women, this can be conceived as a form of state paternalism, which does little to address the underlying structural causes of why women migrate, nor the insufficient protections for domestic workers, including those who have been sentenced to death in a foreign jurisdiction. While the idea of a temporary moratorium as a form of labour diplomacy to pressure governments to better protect domestic workers was accepted by some interviewees, they did not believe that the 2011 and 2015 Indonesian travel bans had been used to such effect.

Finally, despite the state ostensibly trying to protect the lives of its female citizens abroad, paternalist measures such as this are far from signalling the state's intention to abolish capital punishment. As we have witnessed in other jurisdictions, the progressive restriction on the use of the death penalty does not always mark a linear process towards abolition, and in fact could, contrarily, result in the legitimisation and entrenchment of capital punishment.

The authors’ new article on this topic will appear in the next issue of the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, but an early open access version of the full article can be found here: A Permanent Maid Moratorium: The Death Penalty in The Middle East and Female Migrant Workers From Indonesia

	Lucy Harry is an Assistant Professor of Law and Society at the University of Calgary, and Research Associate of the DPRU, University of Oxford.
	Jocelyn Hutton is a Research Associate in the DPRU, University of Oxford.

[1] See e.g. Rachel Silvey, 'Transnational domestication: State power and Indonesian migrant women in Saudi Arabia’ (2004) 23 Political Geography 245; Nana Oishi, Women in motion: Globalization, state policies, and labor migration in Asia (Stanford University Press 2005); Amrita Pande, ‘“I prefer to go back the day before tomorrow, but I cannot”: Paternalistic migration policies and the “global exile”’ (2014) 34 Critical Social Policy 374; Richa Shivakoti, Sophie Henderson and Matt Withers, ‘The migration ban policy cycle: A comparative analysis of restrictions on the emigration of women domestic workers’ (2021) 9(36) Comparative Migration Studies 1.

[2] Maria Platt, ‘Migration, Moralities and Moratoriums: Female Labour Migrants and the Tensions of Protectionism in Indonesia’ (2018) 42 Asian Studies Review 89.