Malaysia on Monday launched an amnesty programme for about 1.2 million illegal foreign workers, but labour groups have demanded its suspension arguing that a simultaneous exercise to register legal expatriates via biometric system is riddled with problems.

"To carry out both exercises in parallel is a massive task which the authorities are unable to handle," Malaysian Employers Federation executive director Shamsuddin Bardan said.  The amnesty is Malaysia's biggest effort to manage its growing population of foreign workers. Undocumented migrant workers, many from India, Indonesia and Bangladesh, will be fingerprinted to create a biometrics database and allowed to stay on if they have a job or will be deported without penalty.

The original plan was to begin the amnesty programme on July 11, but this was postponed because the Home Ministry had problems appointing agents, while the machinery to register was not in place.

Instead, the ministry decided to carry out the biometric system of registering legal workers, beginning two weeks ago, and was still in progress with no definite dateline for completion. Shamsuddin said the current biometric system of registration for legal workers was riddled with so many problems that it needed to be resolved before it could be concluded.

So far, only 600,000 legal workers out of estimated 1.2 million have been registered. Changes made to the programme within the last month have left employers, workers, foreign missions and even some immigration officers on the ground confused. 

Malaysian Trades Union Congress vice-president A Balasubramaniam appealed to the ministry to rope in Labour Department officials and representatives of worker organisations to help in the massive exercise.

"The exercise should not be left to private sector agents who are merely profit-driven to do their work and thus, opening it for abuse," he said, adding that the suspension of the exercise would give time for the authorities to properly plan and overcome shortcomings it currently faced.

Malaysian Agriculture Plantation Association executive director Mohamad Audong said the biometric system exercise had caused much inconvenience to his organisation members because of insufficient registration centres, national news agency Bernama reported.

The exercise is the third such major labour amnesty since 2005, however, some workers deported without punishment in earlier versions were found to have returned with new identities.