From Meseret, to history

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The fifteen-year ordeal of an Ethiopian woman reveals the double torture of the kafala system: the violent one of the sponsor, and the subtle collusion of the Lebanese legal system. To which, nevertheless, Meseret Hailu appeals to ask for justice

In all her photos available online, she looks down, staring straight at the floor. She is about forty years old, the last fourteen of which spent in slave-like conditions, and who knows what she was called before she could be known by her real name, her Ethiopian name: Meseret, in Amharic ‘foundation’, ‘solid base’. Who knows what is left – of that foundation: washed away, scoured by a long decade of abuse, even now that she, Meseret, has finally found a space to denounce: it is slavery. The kafala system is slavery.

Of the migrant domestic workers I met in Lebanon, many, at first, presented themselves with a different name, false or simplified, they said, imposed by the sponsors – often a madame – to dehumanize them with impunity, to have less to do with the humanity of the servants who cleaned their houses, washed and ironed their clothes, folded them in the cupboards, shut up, let themselves be beaten, harassed, sometimes raped, shut up: for the alternative was to lose the sponsorship contract and be deported, penniless, to Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, the Philippines, Indonesia. I think of Aysata Lamghana and Zeinab Tzughi, Sierra Leoneans trapped in a discotheque used as a shelter during last autumn’s violent bombing in Beirut: abandoned by their owners who were themselves displaced, some escaped, others barricaded in a house in Dahieh, safe only because they dared to throw themselves out of the window; how surprised they were that a stranger was not satisfied with ‘Lama’ and ‘Titi’, that she – I – really wanted to know their names, and spent barely a minute trying to memorize their foreign pronunciation.

And I think of Rotna, originally from Sri Lanka, 23 years old and mother-in-incognito, how for months she believed her name was Shanti: the brand of a floor cleaner given to her by her then mama and baba. Yet this is how they got her used to answering the most basic of questions, what-is-your-name.

I am not able to know much about Meseret, beyond the frequent downcast-eyed pose and a list of abuses with which she was harassed for years, erected as historical testimony during the trial for slavery – the first ever in Lebanon – to which she appeared on May 27.

The press release published by  the Geneva-based NGO Legal Action Worldwide (LAW) explained it by sweeping away any shadow of doubt: “Beirut, 27 May 2025: Today, Meseret Hailu, an Ethiopian migrant worker enslaved and abused in Lebanon’s Kafala system for over eight years, testified for the first time before an Investigative Judge at Baabda Palace in Beirut. This follows her groundbreaking 2020 complaint, the first ever in Lebanon to allege slavery and slave trading against her former employer and recruitment agency. Her testimony marks a historic moment for victims of slavery, amplifying the voices of countless others silenced by abuse rampant in the kafala system not only in Lebanon but across the region,” it reads.

“I’m here today not just to tell my story, but to speak the truth about what was done to me and to stand up for every migrant worker in Lebanon who has been silenced or abused,” said Meseret. “What I went through still haunts me. It’s not easy to move on, to work, to live, after such trauma. But being able to speak my truth in front of a judge is a powerful step. I hope it becomes a turning point, not just for me, but for all migrant workers who deserve justice, dignity, and a voice.”

 

‘She just vanished’

Meseret’s journey to this moment has been fraught with challenges. Traveling from rural Ethiopia – that she left at the age of 26, in 2011 – she left behind her ill mother and a young daughter, facing countless obstacles to testify at this critical hearing. 

An estimated 250,000 migrant domestic workers currently reside in Lebanon: the majority are women from African and south and south-east Asian countries, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, Philippines, Madagascar, and Nigeria. They are excluded from Lebanon’s labor law protections, and their status in the country is regulated by the kafala system – a restrictive immigration regime of laws, regulations, and customary practices that ties migrant workers’ legal residency to their employer. Workers cannot leave or change employers without their employers’ consent, placing them at risk of exploitation and abuse, and those who leave the kafeel – the sponsor – without permission risk losing their legal residency in the country and face detention and deportation.

Giving employers this level of control over workers’ lives has led to an array of abuses that Human Rights Watch and many other organizations have documented for years, including non-payment of wages, forced confinement, excessive working hours with no rest days or breaks, and verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. The economic crisis, compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic, has made life for migrant domestic workers even worse. Many have reported that incidents of abuse increased during the lockdown while others have said that their employers slashed their salaries – if they paid them at all, failing the contract’s obligations. Moreover, since May 2020, employers have reportedly abandoned hundreds of workers outside their consulates or embassies, often without money, passports, or their belongings, and without return tickets for workers who are unable to afford expensive repatriation flights to their home countries. A scenario that sadly unfolded again during the two-month relentless Israeli bombardments over the country.

Yet many years before the pandemics and the war, back in 2011, Meseret’s ordeal began: when she sought work in Lebanon to support her family, based on false promises of a monthly salary of 150$ and fair working conditions. Her employer – a dentist from Jounieh, Dr. May Saadeh, 55 – seized her passport upon her arrival, immediately reduced her pay, and started subjecting then 26-year-old Meseret to verbal and physical abuse, restricting her freedom – without counting the extra-labor at Saadeh’s clinic, she was allowed to leave the kafeel’s apartment only three times in eight years and a half -, as well as access to food, and communication with her family. “My madame didn’t allow me to even meet the neighbors, let alone have friends” Meseret Hailu told the watchdog group This Is Lebanon. “I was like an object, hidden away in a room and brought out just to clean.”

For nearly seven years, she endured this abuse – being barred from leaving the house or contacting relatives, being locked inside whenever her employer left, verbal and physical abuse including shoving, beatings and threats with a knife, unpaid wages for consecutive 6 years and 11 months, passport confiscation, long working hours without rest – every day, from 6.30 in the morning until 10 in the evening -, weeks without a weekly day off, not to mention racial and gender discrimination – until Legal Action Worldwide intervened. Yet no help was provided until her family reached out to the media, and her story threatened to become viral.

Back in Ethiopia, in fact, the Hailu family had no idea why they suddenly could no longer reach Meseret. Her mother, Emebet Alemu, stated that she was given no warning and that she started to fear for her daughter’s well-being.  “I don’t know why she suddenly stopped calling,” Emebet told Al Jazeera. “She just vanished.” In a heartbreaking video posted by This Is Lebanon, Emebet admitted that up until 2013 she used to regularly call and send money. “After that she didn’t call. She didn’t send money. We didn’t hear her voice at all. We tried to call her. We asked to talk to her but her boss wasn’t happy, she wouldn’t let us talk to her.” And she continued: “I miss my daughter’s eyes, I just want to see them again. I beg you. I just want my daughter back home.” 

This was in November 2018. The mother wouldn’t hear from her daughter for a few months more, at least until This Is Lebanon caseworker contacted Dr. Saadeh, explaining that a journalist had visited the mother of Meseret in Ethiopia, and that a story was likely to be published on her plight soon. The negotiator also added that the watchdog had compiled a dossier on her, and that if she wouldn’t release Meseret Hailu, they would publish her details on TIL’s Facebook page, which at the time had 60,000 followers, all of whom tuned in to see which abuser would be shamed. Dr. Saadeh might have noticed a similar case in which public pressure eventually forced the release of a young Ethiopian woman, Lensa, held in captivity by the family behind the Eleanore Couture fashion brand.

Something about what May Saadeh saw changed things. Meseret Hailu described being told out of the blue to make a phone call to her mother. Surprised, she made her first phone call to Ethiopia in seven years. Then, given 50$ and nothing else, her few possessions piled up in a bag, she was told she would be leaving for Ethiopia. A few days later, still stunned, she was on a flight back to Addis Ababa. Relieved yet empty-handed, with monthly salaries of 12,400$ still missing, carrying nightmares, traumas, and the acknowledgment of having aged, in just eight years, by at least another hundred.

 

The trial

“Meseret has shown extraordinary courage today. By confronting her enslaver and sharing her story in court, she broke through years of silence, fear, and systemic oppression,” said Antonia Mulvey, Executive Director of Legal Action Worldwide. “Her voice is a rallying cry for justice. One that exposes the brutal realities of the Kafala system and demands accountability. LAW stands with her, and we will not stop until justice is done. Not just for her, but for every woman silenced by this system.” 

May 27’s historical testimony followed a three-year-long legal battle to ensure Meseret’s voice was heard. After numerous rejections of her requests for remote hearings and hearing date changes, the investigation into her allegations was closed in July 2024, before the case being reopened in March 2025 following a recommendation by the Public Prosecutor.

In LAW’s weekly news report of February 2022, the organization offering legal support on the case detailed the second session of the first criminal trial of its kind alleging slavery and slave trading brought by a migrant domestic worker against an employer and recruiting agency. There have been other cases alleging similar allegations such as forced labor, delayed pay, and mistreatment, however, this is the first case in Lebanon and the wider region where the case argues that the conditions that the complainant lived and worked in constitutes slavery.

It was February 10, three years ago: in Beirut’s Palace of Justice, Meseret Hailu with her defendant and an Ethiopian translator on one side, and May Saadeh alone, without a lawyer, on the other. The following session was expected to be held a month and a half later, on March 31st – but did not come until a few weeks ago, on May 27, 2025: after having worked for nearly a decade without any contact with the outside world, now back in her home village in rural Ethiopia, Meseret has been forced for years to follow the lawsuit – may be in vain -, to recall what madame May subjected her to, consuming herself in the legal definition of enslavement, forced labour, and abuse: strive to find a difference. As if while she was in Lebanon, an exile and a prisoner, she was not allowed to have relations with home – and now that she is home, she cannot afford to shed the burden of her eight years of slavery, and Lebanon keeps on besieging her, does not leave her alone. Torture – is also this. Applied violently by the enslaver, and subtly – the manner of silence and collusion – by the Lebanese justice system: in which Meseret, nevertheless, relies.

Commenting on her case, she said: “I want justice. I wish my case could serve as a warning to all abusers that their crimes will catch up to them one day.” But the migrant domestic workers’ struggle for justice does not begin in the cramped space of the sponsor’s flat, nor in the wretched, impossible time of working hours. It starts in their own countries, where recruitment agencies offer unreadable contracts promising liberation from poverty; and even before that: in Lebanese law, the very same law that is being appealed to today, demanding justice.

 

Legalized slavery 

Lebanon has had a standard unified contract for migrant domestic workers since 2009, yet lacking vital safeguards against forced labor, not meeting international human rights and labor standards, and being adopted before the 2011 International Labor Organization (ILO) Domestic Workers Convention. Moreover, in October 2020, the country’s State Shura Council, its top administrative court, delivered a sharp blow to migrant domestic worker rights by suspending the implementation of a new standard unified contract:  adopted by  the Labor Ministry on September 2020, the proposed version included new protections for migrant domestic workers – such as a 48-hour work week, a weekly rest day, overtime pay, sick pay, annual leave, and the national minimum wage, with some permissible deductions for housing and food; it would have allowed workers to terminate their contract without the consent of their employer, dismantling a key aspect of the abusive system of modern slavery that dozens of thousands of people are forced to submit to.

However, the attempt was soon aborted. “To make it clear, it didn’t go anywhere because the recruitment agencies are so powerful that they could block the process,” Banchi Yimer, a former domestic worker who lived in Lebanon for nearly a decade, told me in a voice note on WhatsApp, in the shifted time zone of Montreal, Canada, where she now lives. Alongside fellow Ethiopian migrant workers, she founded Egna Legna (in Amharic ‘Us for Ourselves’), a community-based organization working on migrant domestic workers and women’s issues in Lebanon and Ethiopia.

Egna Legna was invited, alongside other rights’ organizations, to get into the discussion to present a draft law for a new contract to the Lebanese Parliament: “it was not perfect,” Yimer admits, yet it represented a first step to alleviate the burden forced on thousands of women’s shoulders. “Unsurprisingly, the recruitment agencies organized and made sure the law did not pass.” 

Excluded from the Labor Law, migrant domestic workers’ relationship with their employer is only governed by the Code of Obligations and Contracts – as long as it does not conflict with “public order, public morality, and the general provisions,” as it reads. Back in 2020, recruitment agencies further claimed that the proposed standard unified contract violated the principle of freedom to contract, as both parties should have the ability to decide on the terms of the contract, including whether they should be bound by the minimum wage. The Shura Council ruling, thus, failed to take into account both the rights of workers and the power imbalance between the parties.

However, more than four years from that step – and almost fourteen since she first moved to Lebanon – Yimer acknowledges that it would not have changed much, as the main problem is deeper, laying in Lebanon’s current state of law, ruled by nothing but corruption and judicial paralysis. “Even having a fairer contract doesn’t count if there is no accountability for recruitment agencies and sponsors, without anyone there to enforce it.” Despite being obliged under international human rights law to ensure that migrant domestic workers have protections equal to those for other workers under the law, in fact, Lebanon does not have any law governing their relationship with their employer and granting them sufficient protections and rights. “Many of us never got the chance to discuss the contract in our own language. It’s all in Arabic. When we do research and ask several women if they have ever read their contract, or if it was translated for them in their language, the answer is always the same: never. How can they benefit from something they can’t understand, nor are they allowed to have a voice on,” she denounces.

Moreover, given the widespread lack of accountability in the country, crimes committed against migrant workers in Lebanon are hardly ever persecuted. When a sponsor doesn’t pay after ten, fifteen years of domestic work; when the worker is physically or sexually abused, forced to work in multiple houses, subjected to slavery, denied food, days-off, and all of this is proven, still, nothing happens. “We will never have justice in this country” seems to be the recurrent theme of our interview. “And if there is no accountability – how can we trust the contract we signed. If no one respects the law, how could a contract make any difference.”

These are bitter words that leave little hope for Meseret Hailu’s ongoing trial against May Saadeh: however historic, undoubtedly laden with a good deal of symbolism. It is the paradox of demanding freedom from the same body that imposes on you slavery, legalizing it.

According to the ILO, almost 90 percent of the migrant domestic workers employed in Lebanon are recruited through an agency which brings workers into the country through partner agencies, either in the country of origin or through their own representatives abroad. Their business model depends on charging employers high recruitment fees that range between 1,000 and 3,000 dollars. The ILO found that not only employers are often not certain what the fee is covered, but also that there is a large disparity in recruitment fees depending on the income of the employer and the nationality of the worker. “Ethiopian workers, for example, used to come illegally in the past decades, as due to war and reported abuse, the Ethiopian government banned its citizens from entering Lebanon,” Yimer explains, clearly drawing the chain of abuse and trafficking throughout neighboring countries as Sudan, Yemen, and Kenya. “As a start, the recruitment agencies in Lebanon hired some Ethiopian women who could make it into the country. Then their families, husbands, or anyone else they knew in Ethiopia, illegally went from village to village to recruit other vulnerable women, often underaged, manipulate them, promising so many things – rights to a day off, phone access and good salary – to convince them to emigrate: while they did not have any clue of what was going on in Lebanon.” Many of them were very young, even thirteen years old, and did not speak English, French nor Arabic. “They were asked to collect up to 5,000 to 40,000 Ethiopian birr – around 200 to 800 dollars -, and sell their land to pay the recruitment agency. More money was asked when crossing Sudan, where they would pay hotels to stay or additional fees to smugglers. And even at the moment of their arrival to Lebanon, the sponsor would take the first three months of salary from them, even if that is against the law.”

Through Egna Legna’s work, Yimer and her colleagues found out that several women smuggled through Sudan or Yemen have been raped, forcibly imprisoned, and starved. Surviving this nightmare only to realize that once in Lebanon, expecting to be safe, everything that was promised them ended up being a lie. “This happened to me as well,” she admits, “reality didn’t match up at all the expectations I had.” 

And if you change your mind and think you can go back, you’ll soon realize you’re wrong. Even the right to leave is taken away from you. As soon as a migrant worker arrives in Lebanon, sponsors take their passports away – sometimes not giving it back either if they want to leave the country for good. “Some of us left Lebanon without passports, travelling with nothing but a laissez-passer, running away in secret from the sponsor house. We would be refused to get our document back, you know, even if that belongs to us,” Yimer explains. “I myself am a good example of this, as I worked in Lebanon for seven years and the last time I saw my passport was fourteen and a half years ago, the day I arrived, with my baggage of expectations.” In those seven years of domestic work, her sponsor took her document and refused to return it even when she moved to Canada. “I left Lebanon by laissez-passer, and without other legal documents it took fourteen years to first visit my mother. Many of us share a similar story, if not even worse.”

According to the kafala system, workers are not allowed to leave their sponsors’ house, change their job, or leave the country without the employer’s permission. That is part of the contract – therefore the law – unless they are unpaid for four months in a row or face sexual and physical abuse: even those options, though, are often denied. “And if they try to leave the house, what the sponsor does is to immediately call the General Security and file a complaint based on false accusations, such as running away, theft, assault, or even attempted murder. So that many women have been put in prison for years without justice for crimes they did not commit, without evidence or witness.” 

In 2021, Lebanon’s General Security announced that migrant domestic workers will no longer be arrested for false accusations, as through the work of human rights’ organizations they discovered it was most of the time unproven and defamatory. Yet, predictably, the decision was not enforced: and if it is the worker herself who goes to the police station to ask for protection, after facing any abuse, if she finds a complaint on her – the authorities are allowed to send her back to the sponsor, risking detention for lack of legal papers. “Many women we spoke to were not allowed to travel back home because they had to face courts, pay unaffordable fees or go to prison, even if they had not been paid for years. So they stayed in the sponsors’ houses,” it is the reality that Yimer shares with bitterness.

And even if the case of Meseret Hailu does not achieve the legal results hoped for, even if it remains a merely symbolic stone in the history of modern slavery, it will at least have succeeded in shocking the reader at the phrase: they-stayed-in-the-sponsors-houses, to convey the horror of private prisons, those inside our neighbors’ apartments – of all neighborhoods, of all sects -, to compel the busy passer-by to look up, to notice the girl in her early twenties polishing the glass of a luxurious seventh-floor flat, leaning out of the window overlooking the void, who secretly, without being seen by her mama, steals a piece of bread, a spoonful of rice to avoid losing consciousness and falling down – and with the same furtive cunning casts glances of understanding at the neighbor of the building opposite, and of the one behind, and of her own – just a few floors below. To realize, finally, that such legalized slavery in Lebanon is not episodic – but endemic: and it is a disgrace that the most revolutionary of battles underway is still and only for its definition. The kafala system is slavery.