In a scathing rebuke, an Australian Federal Court judge has taken the Home Affairs Department to task for its complete lack of scrutiny regarding a Sri Lankan diplomat who treated her staff like something out of a Dickens novel. According to reports, this diplomat, who seems to have missed a few memos on basic human rights, decided it was perfectly acceptable to confiscate a staff member’s passport and grant her the grand total of two days off—over three years.
The former deputy high commissioner of Sri Lanka to Australia, Himalee Arunatilaka, has now been ordered to cough up $543,000 in unpaid wages and interest to her domestic worker. Oh, and there’s a hefty fine waiting in the wings for her blatant breaches of employment laws, too.
During her diplomatic stint from 2015 to 2018, Ms. Arunatilaka managed to deny her employee, Priyanka Danaratna, anything resembling fair pay or working conditions. The court heard that Ms. Danaratna toiled away from 6am to 10pm, seven days a week, and only received a pitiful two days off after she managed to burn her hand with cooking oil. All for the princely sum of $11,200—or about 75 cents an hour, which was, naturally, sent straight to Sri Lanka.
And just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, Ms. Danaratna wasn’t even allowed to leave the Canberra residence alone and had her passport confiscated for good measure.
Justice Elizabeth Raper, clearly unimpressed, pointed out that if the Home Affairs Department had bothered to do their job, “Ms Danaratna’s employment may have been very different.” You don’t say! She added that there was no attempt by Ms. Arunatilaka to hide her appalling behavior, making the Department’s inaction all the more perplexing.
To top it off, Ms. Arunatilaka is now Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva—a role one might hope comes with a crash course in employment laws.
This case is just the latest in a growing list of diplomatic debacles where officials from countries with a less-than-stellar record on workers’ rights get caught playing fast and loose with Australian employment laws. For example, India’s former high commissioner to Australia, Navdeep Suri Singh, was also slapped with a hefty $189,000 bill for unpaid wages after keeping a domestic worker in “slave-like” conditions at his Canberra residence.
Neither Ms. Arunatilaka nor Mr. Suri bothered to defend themselves in court, leaving it anyone’s guess whether their long-suffering employees will ever see a dime of what they’re owed. The courts have made it clear, however, that diplomatic immunity doesn’t stretch far enough to cover wage theft and human rights violations.
David Hillard, the pro bono lawyer leading these cases, summed it up: “It’s hard to believe that in 21st-century Australia, someone could be trapped in a job for three years and paid just 75 cents an hour.” But thanks to these rulings, it’s clear that even senior diplomats can’t hide behind their titles to keep their staff in “slave-like” conditions.
