MALAYSIA hopes Indonesia will reconsider its plan to impose a moratorium on sending its maids to the country, said Ahmad Zahid Hamidi.

The home minister said he would meet Indonesian Human Resources Minister Hanif  Dhakiri on the matter soon, and that the meeting would discuss the safety of Indonesians brought to Malaysia to work as maids.

He said among the matters to be raised was the standard operating procedure that Malaysian employers must follow.

Zahid said Malaysia would not protect those who abused their maids.

He was responding to a Jakarta Post report that Indonesian Ambassador to Malaysia Rusdi Kirana had proposed a halt in the sending of maids to Malaysia, while efforts were made to restructure the employment administration process to fix the relationship between the countries, which has been strained due to repeated cases of ill treatment of migrant workers in Malaysia.

Zahid said he would be “saddened” if the report was taken as truth as the recent case of Indonesian maid Adelina Lisao, who died following alleged abuse, was an isolated one.

He told reporters after a walkabout in Bagan Datuk, Perak, today that he would meet Hanif to discuss the issue.

Jakarta Post carried an article today, saying Indonesia was looking into the possibility of imposing a moratorium in light of Adelina’s case.

On Sunday, the 26-year-old Indonesian, who was forced to sleep with her employers’ dog on the porch outside their house, died while receiving treatment at Bukit Mertajam Hospital in Penang.

She suffered severe injuries to the head and face, and had infected wounds on the hands and legs.

Penang police chief A. Thaiveegan said police believed that the case would be resolved soon, following the arrest of three members of a family, aged 36, 39 and 60.

Adelina’s death has sparked debate on the need to strengthen protection for migrant workers, and raised questions on whether Indonesians should be sent to work in a country with porous borders used as a region-wide human trafficking route.

Rusdi told Jakarta Post that President Joko Widodo, who supports the idea of halting the recruitment of Indonesian maids in Malaysia, had raised the issue during an annual consultation meeting hosted by Prime Minister Najib Razak in Kuching last year.

“A moratorium is important so that we can restructure our TKI (migrant workers) employment system to prevent cases such as Adelina’s from happening again,” he was quoted as saying, referring to migrant workers in the informal sector.

He has been pushing the idea of a moratorium since last year.

In 2014, a couple in Malaysia received the death sentence for starving their Indonesian maid to death.

AFP reported that official Indonesian figures showed that 62 migrant workers from East Nusa Tenggara died last year while working in Malaysia, with most of them working illegally.

Data shows that Adelina is the eighth death this year, with the rest dying due to accidents or illness.

This is not the first time that Indonesia has proposed a moratorium on its maids working in Malaysia.

In 2011, the republic lifted a two-year moratorium when a memorandum of understanding was signed between both countries. The MoU expired in 2016, and has not been renewed.

However, last year, when tabling Budget 2018, Najib, who is also finance minister, said the government was giving employers the choice to recruit maids directly from nine source countries without going through agents, and Indonesia was one of the countries.

Director-General of Immigration Mustafar Ali said the process of hiring foreign maids took only take eight days via the new online maid system, which came into effect on January 1. – February 17, 2018.