Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s proposed ban on sending domestic workers to Malaysia should be accompanied by a major overhaul in protections for these workers. On October 14, 2011, Hun Sen promised an opposition lawmaker, Mu Sochua, to halt migration in the wake of repeated complaints of abuse during recruitment in Cambodia and employment in Malaysia.

Cambodia’s revised regulation on labor migration, approved by Prime Minister Hun Sen on August 17, 2011, falls far short of minimum protections needed to safeguard migrant domestic workers. The regulation omits or only has vague protections for workers and does not adequately address such problems as debt bondage, illegal recruitment of underage workers, and forced confinement by recruitment agencies in Cambodia.

The adoption by the International Labor Organization (ILO) on June 16, 2011, of a new, groundbreaking treaty to extend key labor protections to domestic workers will protect millions of people who have been without guarantees of their basic rights. Governments, trade unions, and employers' organizations that make up the ILO overwhelmingly voted to adopt the ILO Convention on Decent Work for Domestic Workers, which establishes the first global standards for the estimated 50 to 100 million domestic workers worldwide, the vast majority of whom are women and girls.

I was not prepared to document torture and severe abuses when I started researching the human rights situation for migrants in Europe. After all, I was working on Western Europe, the developed world with a rule of law, independent judiciaries, functioning social services, and oversight bodies.