Himalee Subashini Arunatilaka, the current Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations in Geneva, has been ordered by the Australian Federal Court to pay $543,000 in unpaid wages and interest to a domestic worker who served her when she was deputy high commissioner of Sri Lanka in Australia.
The Federal Court has ruled that Arunatilaka must pay Priyanka Danaratna $374,000 in unpaid wages plus $169,000 in interest after failing to pay the domestic worker any regular wages between 2015 and 2018. According to ABC Australia, when Priyanka Danaratna moved from Sri Lanka to Australia to work for a diplomat nearly a decade ago, she was optimistic about her future. She was in her mid-thirties and had never visited another country before. But that optimism faded when she arrived in Canberra and unknowingly entered a "slavery-type arrangement", says David Hillard, a pro bono partner at law firm Clayton Utz.
Over those three years, she was only paid $11,212 for her work. Hillard says effectively, "she worked nonstop for three years for about 65 cents an hour". "It's an example of how modern slavery works," he added. Hillard represented Danaratna in legal proceedings against Ms Arunatilaka in a civil case under the Fair Work Act. She was accused of underpaying her employee $374,000. In a judgment handed down on Thursday (15), the Federal Court found that Arunatilaka breached the Fair Work Act in several ways, including not paying by Australian employment laws.
"She's in a very senior diplomatic role now in Geneva. I think it's absolutely appalling that this can be allowed to happen," Hillard says. "But I think it also reflects on perhaps the nature of … the diplomatic world in that I suspect that perhaps Arunatilaka and the Sri Lankan government have not viewed what she's done as something particularly extraordinary. That this perhaps is just par for the course in terms of how domestic workers are treated in the residences of senior diplomats."
Danaratna also told courts that Arunatilaka confiscated her passports and never returned it to her. She also said that she was never allowed to leave home alone and if she did, she would often be accompanied by someone else from the same household. Sometimes she was permitted to go for a short walk around the neighbourhood on her own. Eventually, this helped her escape.
"On August 14, 2018, I told Arunatilaka and her husband that I was going for a walk. I left Ms Arunatilaka's residence, and the two people from the Salvation Army were waiting for me nearby in a car," she said. The group drove to Sydney, where Ms Danaratna was taken to a Salvation Army safe house. Although diplomats are offered immunity, Hillard says Arunatilaka is not immune to prosecution in the case concerning her treatment of Danaratna.
Arunatilaka is a staunch loyalist of the Sri Lankan regime and has found every attempt to deflect accusations of war crimes and genocide committed against Tamils during her tenure in Geneva as Sri Lanka's permanent representative.
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