This session is grounded in the Gulf: a region under significant geopolitical and economic pressure, with high and still-growing labour demand, and — in some corridors — the direct effects of conflict on recruitment routes and the workers moving through them. The tension is sharp. The crisis is disrupting deployments and remittances even as labour demand in construction, hospitality, transport, and domestic work remains structurally high. Responsible recruitment commitments were written for stable conditions; this session asks what they mean when the context is not.

It brings together a company, a worker rights organisation, the ILO, and a lawyer working on the ground in Malaysia. The discussion moves in three steps. First, what is actually happening right now — what our panellists are seeing on the ground that the rest of us may not be. Then we sit with the tension: where the frameworks and commitments responsible recruitment is built on are no longer adequate to the conditions they are meant to govern. And we close by asking what a genuinely different approach would require, drawing on examples from Malaysia. The larger question guiding the whole discussion: how does responsible recruitment as a business model hold up under opposite pressures at once — surging labour demand pulling workers in, and the compounding shocks of conflict pushing them out?

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.

Despite international standards prohibiting recruitment fees for seafarers, costs continue to be pushed onto workers through complex and often hidden chains of agents, sub-agents, brokers, and other service providers across countries of origin and transit. This session will examine why recruitment fees remain a persistent problem in the maritime industry and what can be done to address them, drawing on the work of the Action Group on Seafarer Recruitment Costs.

The discussion will bring in individual worker experiences, alongside the wider structural challenges that enable this practice to persist. The session will also mark the launch of a practical toolkit to help companies better identify, prevent, and address recruitment fee risks.

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, introduced by a message from Mary Robinson, 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.

For many workers, climate risk begins at home. Floods, extreme heat, drought, cyclones and loss of livelihoods are making it harder for households to earn a stable income. Migration can help families cope, but it can also push workers into debt, risky recruitment channels and situations where they have limited real choice.

The risk does not end after migration. At destination, workers may face extreme heat, unsafe workplaces, poor housing, delayed wages and weak access to protection. In this sense, many migrant workers face climate risk twice: first in the places they leave, and then in the places where they work.

Focusing on labour migration from South Asia, this workshop will examine workers’ climate vulnerabilities through a supply-chain journey approach. It will look at where risks appear across the migration cycle: pre-recruitment, recruitment, deployment, employment and return. It will also examine who can act at each stage, including businesses, recruiters, governments and civil society organisations.

The discussion will focus on practical action. It will map how climate change is reshaping migration patterns, labour risks and worker vulnerability across key sectors and corridors. It will also identify where worker vulnerability and business exposure intersect, recognising that both dimensions of risk must be understood together to develop grounded, practical and effective recommendations.

The findings from the workshop will help inform IHRB’s work to develop 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.

By Sarah Mostafa-Kamel, Head of Migration Programmes, IHRB.