When conflict disrupts a recruitment corridor, the cost rarely lands on the business — it lands on the worker. In unpaid wages, unrecoverable fees, and debt that cannot be repaid because the job that was supposed to pay it no longer exists. Responsible recruitment frameworks were designed for stable conditions. Conflict breaks them — and the worker carries the cost.

This session asks what responsible recruitment actually requires when conditions stop being stable. Drawing on evidence from across recruitment corridors, the panel brings together the ILO, a worker rights organisation, a business and human rights expert, and a practitioner to examine where company commitments break down in practice, what it takes to make Employer Pays crisis-proof, and what companies and governments need to put in place before the next disruption arrives.

Malaysian National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights (2025–2030) marks a key moment to move responsible recruitment from principle to practice, the question now is what comes next.

This session will focus on translating that policy commitment into enforcement and business practice. Grounded in the realities of Malaysia’s labour migration system, where recruitment often involves multiple actors and fees can persist through less visible channels, the discussion will examine the roles of government and business in shaping wider market practice.

This session will discuss the transition of IRIS from IOM to SAI and what this means for the future of responsible recruitment. Bringing together representatives from both organisations in conversation with IHRB, the session will reflect on the significance of the transition, what continuity stakeholders can expect, and how the next phase of IRIS may support stronger implementation, accountability, and engagement across the responsible recruitment field.

Climate disruption is no longer a background condition for labour mobility; it is an active force reshaping why people leave their homes, where they set off from, and what kind of work conditions they are heading towards. Drawing on the realities of corridors stressed by extreme heat, flooding, and agricultural collapse, this session examines what responsible recruitment must anticipate when origin conditions, destination conditions, and contract assumptions are all shifting at once.

The discussion brings together business, government, workers, and climate migration perspectives to test an emerging just transition agenda for labour mobility against regional realities. Thinking through what decarbonisation and adaptation risks, new corridor and workforce flows, and emerging governance gaps actually mean for the responsible recruitment agenda.

This session, jointly organized by IOM and Amazon, will explore how data and collective action can strengthen responsible recruitment and human rights due diligence for migrant workers across global supply chains. It will present the emerging Migrant Worker Impact Data Hub as a practical response to persistent data and evidence gaps, and as a way to support more coordinated, worker-informed and technology-enabled action on forced labour and migrant worker rights. The Hub intends to develop a digital platform that can progressively bring together relevant data, migrant worker insights and a multistakeholder coalition to support risk prioritization, supplier engagement, remediation, monitoring and policy alignment.

These efforts are also connected to the broader World Economic Forum Global Data Partnership Against Forced Labour (GDPFL), which aims to strengthen data and collective approaches to address forced labour, while leveraging emerging AI capabilities to improve risk intelligence, data governance and coordinated action across sectors and geographies.

The session will be opened with remarks delivered online by Mary Robinson, Founding Chair and Patron of IHRB, former President of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

South Asia sits at the centre of two defining global shifts: rising climate stress and growing demand for migrant labour. Migrant workers in the region face climate risk twice, at origin and at destination, and current recruitment and employment practices are not designed to absorb either. This workshop begins from a clear proposition: labour corridors and industries requiring green skills cannot be called climate-resilient if the workers sustaining them are entering through debt, distress and constrained choice. Using a worker and supply-chain journey lens, the session will map where climate-related risks enter the migration process, who holds influence at each stage, and what practical action businesses, recruiters, governments and civil society can take. Outputs will feed directly into IHRB’s development of a climate-resilient labour mobility framework.

As legal frameworks evolve and cross-border litigation becomes an increasingly viable avenue for remedy, multinationals face growing scrutiny over their responsibility for labour practices across their global supply chains, scrutiny that extends to how those practices affect migrant workers on the ground. This session examines what compliance looks like in practice across different international jurisdictions.

The panel brings together perspectives from litigation experience and regional advocacy for migrant workers’ rights to explore the intersection of legal accountability, corporate responsibility, and workers’ access to justice.

The rapid adoption of AI and technology-driven tools in recruitment has the potential to transform hiring at scale, but it also carries significant risks. Many of these tools are built on historical data that encodes longstanding patterns of discrimination. Without deliberate action to identify and address embedded bias, and remove discriminatory barriers created by how these automated systems are deployed and managed.

This session will explore the steps employers, technology developers, recruitment agencies, and regulators must take to ensure that AI- and tech-based recruitment systems are trained to recognise and unlearn embedded bias, and the accountability frameworks needed to ensure responsible use.