Background

Access to justice is a key component of fair recruitment and rights-based labour migration governance. Yet migrant workers often face significant barriers to obtaining effective remedies when their rights are violated, including limited knowledge of their rights, language barriers, fear of retaliation, limited access to legal assistance, high costs and cross-border jurisdictional challenges. Addressing these barriers is essential to preventing recruitment-related abuses and ensuring that migrant workers can seek redress when their rights are violated.

The ILO's General Principles and Operational Guidelines for Fair Recruitment underline the importance of accessible and effective complaint and grievance mechanisms and appropriate remedies. Governments, employers, labour recruiters and workers' organizations all have complementary roles in preventing abusive recruitment practices and facilitating access to remedy, including in cases involving recruitment fees and related costs, contract substitution, deception, non-payment of wages and other labour rights violations.

The webinar will present ILO knowledge and evidence on access to justice for migrant workers and examine practical approaches to strengthening complaint and grievance mechanisms, labour dispute resolution and access to effective remedies. Through a tripartite exchange, participants will hear from governments, employers' and workers' organizations and other practitioners about approaches to addressing recruitment-related abuses and facilitating access to remedy.

The discussion will also explore the role of bilateral and cross-border cooperation in addressing grievances involving actors operating across different jurisdictions, as well as opportunities for peer learning and strengthened collaboration between countries of origin and destination.

Please register here.

The event is organised in collaboration with the ITCILO and supported by the Fair Recruitment Forward project, funded by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), and the THAMM+ programme, funded by the European Union.

Key documents