A/HRC/39/52 presented in her 2015 (A/HRC/30/35/Add.1). report after undertaking a country visit in 2014 10. The Governments of Italy and Togo have accepted the Special Rapporteur’s request to conduct an official visit in the second half of 2018. She thanks both Governments for their support and calls on other Member States to respond favourably to her requests for visits. II. Legal concepts: slavery, servitude and forced labour 11. Today about half the total population of international migrants are women. They usually move across international borders in search of a better life for themselves and their families. Many of these women suffered from poverty, marginalization and gender-based violence and discrimination in their countries of origin. In destination countries, they often find that working in female-dominated occupations, such as in the domestic sector, is their only option. As migrant domestic workers, some women face grave human rights violations including servitude and slavery-like practices. The present report assesses the impact of slavery and servitude on marginalized women workers in the global domestic economy. 12. Despite its prohibition as a universally applicable international customary law norm enforceable by States against one another 2 and from which no derogation is permissible even in situations of emergency,3 slavery continues to exist as one of the most egregious human rights violations in the global economy. The definition of slavery elaborated in the Slavery Convention of 1926, as supplemented by the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery of 1956, as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised”, remains applicable today. However, the legal right to ownership has been replaced by many different forms of coercion and control and, as discussed in the present report, are exacerbated in the case of migrant workers in domestic servitude, who are in a foreign country and have irregular migrant status. 13. The exercise of “any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership” thus distinguishes servitude from “slavery”. 4 In practice, however, the distinction is often not very clear and depends largely on the degree of control and power exercised over the individual. In its decisions, the European Court of Human Rights has set out a number of indicators for domestic servitude involving migrant domestic workers linked to the vulnerability of the person, limitations on personal freedom, violation of human dignity, excessive hours of work, no payment or remuneration or disproportionate payments and the perceived permanency of the situation.5 14. Servitude often occurs in situations of economic exploitation “in which the victim is so dependent on the perpetrator that she or he cannot leave the situation of exploitation” (see A/HRC/15/20, para. 47). Dependency can be created by economic factors, lack of freedom of movement and physical and psychological abuse (ibid., paras. 48–51). Servitude often results from debt bondage, especially where excessive recruitment fees are charged by agents and the recruitment of migrant workers is unregulated in national legislation. Debt bondage is defined as “the status or condition arising from a pledge by a debtor of his personal services or of those of a person under his control as security for a debt, if the value 2 3 4 5 4 Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Company, Ltd (Belgium v. Spain), Judgment of 5 February 1970, I.C.J. reports 1970, p. 3. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, art. 4 (2). The Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery recognizes that institutions and practices such as those listed in article 1 may also constitute slavery. See, for example, Siliadin v. France, judgment of 26 October 2005 (application No. 73316/01). See also Helen Duffy, “Litigating modern day slavery in regional courts”, Journal of International Criminal Justice, vol. 14, No. 2 (May 2016).