English abstract
The present study aims at identifying legal provisions of forced labour, particularly in Omani law and international conventions against forced labour. The study also explores the extent which the Omani legislator has been consistent in criminalizing and punishing forced labour as contained in the relevant international conventions. The researcher tries to find that by answering the following questions:
1. What is the pattern of conduct of the forced labour situation?
2. What is the mechanism of protecting groups subject to and not subject to labour law
from the risks of forced labour, specifically in the countries that criminalize forced labour via labour law as the case in the Sultanate?
3. Is the criminalization of forced labour in labour legislation sufficient to fight this phenomenon? Or should this phenomenon bé criminalized in the Penal Code?
4. What is the compatibility of Omani legislation in criminalizing and punishing forced labour with the relevant international conventions?
To answer these questions, the researcher determined the meaning of forced labour in the light of its definition contained in the Forced Labour Convention No. 29 of 1930, which is based on two things. First, the association of forced labour with coercion. Second, it contains the deprivation of freedom. In addition to clarify the position of the Omani legislator and comparative legislations regarding criminalizes and punishes forced labour, where legislations differ in its attitude between the criminalization of forced labour under the Labour Law, Penal Code, or Human Trafficking Law, while the Omani legislator expressly criminalized forced labour under article 3 of the Omani Labour Law. The study comes up with the following findings:
1. The idea in carrying out forced labour or not is to prove that the worker has no choice
to accept or reject the work he asked to do, and there is no any consideration of the difficult circumstances surrounding the worker and the lack of employment opportunities in the case of forced labour, as long as the employer does not contribute to its creation.
2. The Omani Labour Law provides special protection against forced labour for all
categories to which its provisions apply and which are not exempt by the text of the article 2, while the categories exempted from the scope of application of the Omani
Labour Law have been protected by other laws in the Sultanate.
3. It would be more effective to criminalize forced labour under the Penal Code, since it
applies to all cases of forced labour without exception for any group that falls victim to, unlike the Labour Law, which excludes certain categories of workers from its scope of application, such as the Omani Labour Law, which excludes employees inside or outside houses like drivers, a nannies, a chefs and others who are in their range from application, which are one of the most vulnerable categories of forced labour.
4. Omani law is in conformity with the provisions of the conventions of forced labour,
in regard to criminalize this act and punishes it with imprisonment and fine or one of them, but the sentence or punishment imposed was disproportionate to the offence committed, so the legislator would have preferred to emphasize the penalty in order to act as a deterrent to all those who had tried to deprived worker freedom to choose his work.
