DFA Repatriates More Distressed Filipinos from Lebanon

05 February 2020 – The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), through the Office of the Undersecretary for Migrant Workers’ Affairs (OUMWA), continues to bring home distressed Filipinos from Lebanon.

The latest batch of repatriates, which includes 31 female adults and 15 minors, arrived in Manila yesterday afternoon and were welcomed by the DFA-OUMWA together with the Inter-agency Council against Trafficking and its member-agencies.

The total number of repatriated Filipinos from Lebanon has now reached 163 since the Voluntary Mass Repatriation Program (VMRP) at the Philippine Embassy in Beirut started in December 2019. Through the VMRP, the DFA paid for the repatriates’ airfare to Manila and to their respective provinces, if any, and immigration penalties, secured their exit visas, and sheltered them in a holding facility while their cases were being resolved at the Lebanese Immigration Office.

The Alert Level in Lebanon was raised from 1 (Precautionary Phase) to 2 (Restriction Phase) on 09 January 2020, in view of the mass repatriation of overseas Filipinos due to the economic crisis in the country and in order to strengthen the enforcement of the ban on the deployment of new workers to Lebanon. END

(DFA Photos by Philip Adrian Fernandez)