Opening remarks from IHRB CEO, Julia Batho, at the 2026 Global Forum for Responsible Recruitment

IHRB's CEO, Julia Bathos delivers opening remarks at the ninth edition of our Global Forum for Responsible Recruitment in Kuala Lumpur on 30 June 2026.

Hello, everyone. Welcome. It's a pleasure to see so many familiar and new faces here in Kuala Lumpur for the 2026 Global Forum. For those of us here today, we're going to make the most of the two days that we have in person. As Sarah said, there is a reception at the end of the day that we can enjoy together.

And for those of you at home, thank you for joining us today, and I hope you can also stay for the next two days. Having hosted Global Forums in Berlin, Singapore, New York, London, and Bangkok, I think it's quite timely and right that we have it here in Malaysia this year. Malaysia sits at the heart of many of the migration corridors we work with, deals with many of the issues we are looking to address, and is also a very welcoming country.

So it's wonderful for us to be hosting this in Malaysia this year. I would like to thank our colleagues here on the ground, in regional offices as well, UN agencies, civil society, all of our partners, and the team who have made these two days possible. But in particular, I wanted to thank the Walmart Foundation.

Without them, this forum wouldn't be possible. Our field is going through a very difficult funding moment. Budgets are being cut, whole teams are being dismantled, a lot of really important work on business and human rights is being discontinued for lack of funding. We don't take these opportunities for granted. This kind of support that the Walmart Foundation is providing for us to be here today and together with so many of you is really much appreciated and much needed. So to our colleagues at the Walmart Foundation, thank you very much.

As Sarah said, the theme of this year's Forum is: building resilience in a time of global disruption. When we were developing the agenda for this year's forum, we wanted to think of a theme that was all-encompassing. We wanted to talk about many of the challenges that are interrelated and overlapping in this very, very complex context that we are going through right now. But disruption is an interesting concept, and I would like to pause in this concept for a second. 

I think often when we talk about disruption, we're involved in policy discussions, and disruption is often addressed as something very abstract. It's a trend, it's a shift, it's a reconfiguration of trade routes, it's an, it's a bit of a nuisance, and we talk about it sometimes, in the same way we talk about the weather.

So, the weather is bad, it will get better. We don't know. The forecast will tell. But disruption is not an abstract concept. It always lands on someone, and the people it lands on the hardest in the world of work are the workers. And among workers, we're talking about low-paid workers in labour-intensive sectors and functions, and those who are chasing better lives for them and for their families, including migrant workers.

So to be very specific about what disruption looks like in this context, it looks like a seafarer on a stranded ship in a conflict zone. He or she is unable to leave, scared for his or her life, unable to send money home, unable to go home. This is disruption. Or it can be a worker on a construction site or on a plantation when temperatures get too hot for them to be able to work.

But then they are told that they need to continue or they won't get paid. This is disruption. It also looks like a factory worker who has no orders because a trade ban has been imposed. He or she still has a recruitment debt, but they don't have a job anymore. This is also disruption. Disruption can also be a worker whose job is being assessed or replaced by a technology that in any other circumstances could actually be very helpful.

It could give that same worker more information, more voice, access to better remedies. But in this case, that same technology is filtering out their job application before a human even reads it, and for reasons he or she will never know. So this is also disruption. And these are not random stories or anecdotes.

They are real examples of what happens in the world of work when global pressures converge, and where the very recruitment and labour systems are already strained, already uneven, already weighted against workers. 

But for the next two days, I would really urge us not to focus just on what is really, really difficult right now. I also want us to spend some time and most of our time focusing on what is possible. Because the reason the Global Forum exists and has existed for the past nine editions, is because we believe and we know that there is evidence that we can bring some change. Ten years ago, the employer pays principle was just an abstract concept, sometimes even contested.Many people didn't believe it was possible. 

Now, today, the Employer Pays Principle is an expectation. In any serious conversation about supply chain and recruitment, you would expect to hear about responsible recruitment and the Employer Pays Principle, and that happened not just because of conversations like these ones that we're gonna have here over the next few days, but also because of these discussions.

And these discussions and the arduous work of chipping away day after day is what helped us to turn those ideas, those abstract concepts into frameworks and into principles that are now expectations. 

But we all know, we are very aware that frameworks and principles are not enough, and that there is a lot of work ahead of us.

The principle is not yet applied consistently. There are many workers, and I would say the majority, who are still paying fees to get a job. Enforcement is very uneven across most jurisdictions, and what real implementation looks like in practice is still unclear. So it is our job to continue to push this agenda forward and to turn it into practice.

Not just any practice, but widespread practice until it becomes the norm. So over the next two days, I would really like us to do three things: to be very honest about where progress is stuck, and we should name those moments, and we should be very open and critical about it. But also, we should celebrate where we have made progress, and we should acknowledge that and take note of that and try to replicate it.

We should also be very specific. I would say generalisations, finger-pointing is not gonna take us very far. So the more specific we can be, the closer we are to actually having an impact on a construction worker, a plantation worker, a worker in a care home. Let's think about the real people out there whose jobs depend on actually going day after day to repay that debt, and what can we do to move that agenda forward?

And then let's all leave this Forum with something concrete that we can do and some collaboration that we can move forward because of the conversations that we're gonna have here today. We shouldn't take this opportunity to be together in person for granted, so let's make the most of it, and let's make people at home jealous that they are not here.