Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center Reports Myanmar Ban on The Kafala System

Cape Town | July 2026

(Pachodo.org) - The Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center has received reports that The Kafala System book has been banned in Myanmar.

The book examines the sponsorship-based labour regime that governs migrant workers across the Gulf states, Jordan, and Lebanon, and extends that analysis to the forced-labour conditions inside compounds concentrated in Myawaddy, on the border with Thailand, and in Shan State along the Chinese frontier. It argues that both systems, distinct as they are in geography and legal form, share a common root: migrant workers stripped of the ability to leave an employer, control their movement, or seek help, with devastating consequences for people who often travelled abroad in search of nothing more than an honest wage.

The reported ban fits a documented pattern. Independent researchers have found that publicity and international pressure have repeatedly preceded the relocation, rather than the closure, of scam operations in the region, and Myanmar’s authorities, who maintain tight control over information relating to the compounds, have consistently resisted external scrutiny even as the industry continues to expand.

The book’s examination of Myanmar addresses one of the gravest ongoing forced-labour crises in the world. The compounds hold thousands of trafficked workers compelled to run online fraud operations under threat of violence. Victims recovered from them have included nationals of Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, and other African states, alongside workers from the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia, many recruited with the promise of legitimate employment before being trafficked across the border and held against their will. Survivors have described beatings, electric shocks, and workers suspended by their wrists for failing to meet fraud quotas. The book draws a direct line from the legal architecture of Kafala, which ties a worker’s legal status to a single employer, to the even more extreme, extralegal captivity of the scam compounds, arguing that both function by removing a worker’s power to leave.

The Center regards the ban as beside the central point. The purpose of the book is to document what has happened to people who left home in search of work and found captivity instead, and to draw the connection between a legal system that ties workers to employers and an illegal one that ties them to compounds by force. Suppressing that account does not alter the testimony it contains or the urgency of the response it calls for.

Saad Kassis-Mohamed, Chairman of the Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center, said: “Our reporting on the treatment of African migrants in Myanmar has led to this book being suppressed. That only confirms how urgently this account needed to be told. We wrote it because the workers trafficked into Myanmar’s scam compounds and the workers bound to a single employer under Kafala are, in the end, victims of the same principle: that a person’s right to leave can be taken from them for someone else’s profit.”

The Center calls on Myanmar’s authorities to permit independent investigation of the scam compounds and to cooperate fully with international efforts to identify, rescue, and repatriate trafficked workers, regardless of their nationality. It further calls on the governments of African states and the Philippines with citizens known to be held in these compounds to expand consular support and safe-return pathways for survivors, and on Gulf states, Jordan, and Lebanon to accelerate reform of the Kafala system so that migrant workers’ legal status no longer depends on the goodwill of a single employer. The Kafala System book is available through Hugendubel and other booksellers.

About the Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center

The Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center is an independent, non-partisan research and advocacy organisation based in Cape Town and supported by the WeCare Foundation. The Center works across Africa, South Asia, the Gulf region, and beyond to protect the rights and welfare of individuals and communities facing environmental injustice, denial of rights, and institutional failure. It holds no political affiliation, takes no position in party politics in any jurisdiction in which it operates, and reports its findings without regard to the governments or commercial interests they concern. The Center engages directly with United Nations mechanisms to advocate on behalf of those whose cases it documents. For more information, visit wcrfoundation.com.

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