Late last year, the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women conducted a simple exercise within our network of women migrant workers. We asked them what they expect from the UN’s first-ever International Migration Review Forum. The IMRF, which begins on Tuesday, is a quadrennial forum created so that member states and other stakeholders can review the world’s progress in implementing the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM).
Not surprisingly, few of the women had heard of either the IMRF or the GCM. Only 30, from a group of 200 spread across seven countries, had some idea of what these were when we began talking. But once they were brought up to speed they had many questions:
“Does the GCM say that we should not be treated badly by our employers?”
