Philippine Consulate in Macau
The Philippine Consulate in Macau said its plans to reopen on Sundays in mid-September are still pending.
In a previous Times report, Filipino migrant group Migrante Macau urged the Consulate to open on Sundays.
The Philippines’s Consul General in Macau, Lilybeth Deapera, explained to the Times yesterday that they have yet to receive the go-ahead from the Philippine’s Department of Foreign Affairs to operate on Sundays as part of a three-month trial.
“We asked for authorization from Manila but we have not received that yet, so it’s just plans,” she wrote to the Times.
The Consulate opened its doors on Sundays a few years ago, but only a few local Filipino migrants requested for services over the weekend.
“We really need an honest-to-goodness study of the scheme because we’ve done it before and [almost] no one came to the Consulate,” she stressed.
Early this year, the Consulate documented its dialogue with some members of Migrante Macau and sent it to Manila. According to association president Emerlina de Lina, they have submitted a document requesting for the Consulate to open on Sundays, with 2,832 signatures from Filipinos in the region.
While some said that several signatures were obtained under false pretenses, de Lina argued: “We’re not inventing [the numbers of] the signatures. There is really a need for the Consulate to open on Sundays.”
Commenting on the possible three-month trial of the Consulate’s Sunday operations, de Lina said that the Office should not have a “try-out” phase.
“If there are [only] a few persons who ask for services [on Sundays] in those three months, are they going to close again?” de Lina questioned. “What we want is for them to operate even though there are no users. The [Consulate] is not a business; it’s a service that they have to provide for the people.” LV
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