Tenaganita director Glorene Das added that lenient punishments for those found guilty of abusing domestic workers set a bad precedent.
This followed the Federal Court’s decision to allow the appeals of Soh Chew Tong and Chin Chui Ling against their conviction under Section 302 of the Penal Code for murder, and the accompanying death sentence.
The Penang couple, who own a hardware business in Bukit Mertajam, were convicted of starving their Cambodian maid to death two years ago.
They have now been sentenced to 10 years in jail under a lesser charge – Section 304(b) – for culpable homicide not amounting to murder.
Glorene told FMT Tenaganita does not support the death sentence in general, but said a 10-year sentence for starving a domestic worker to death was “unacceptable”.
“The 10-year sentence sets a precedence that would give opportunities to irresponsible employers to abuse and torture their domestic workers.
“As more than 30,000 to 40,000 potential employers are awaiting domestic workers, this precedence is incredibly worrying.”
She said for such cases, the jail term should be higher, with the perpetrators’ assets frozen as well.
“Is the criminal justice system treating this case lightly because for them this is just about a domestic worker who is not recognised as a worker but as a servant and maid?”
She said the punishments meted out showed that the prosecution had not done their jobs as well as they could have.
“Such a sentence also indicates the weak prosecution in terms of its investigation and compiling of facts and details to build stronger evidence against the accused,” she said.