Countries are shaded by their score on 13 farm-relevant treaties, or by whether they ratified one treaty. Click a country to open its profile.
The ratification map covers 13 treaties chosen for farm work, three of them migration treaties: the Migrant Workers Convention, C181 on recruitment agencies and P29 on forced labor. Ratifications of the other migration treaties, such as the Refugee Convention, C97, C143 and C189, are not in the map yet.
| # | Score | Instrument | Binding | Migration rel. | Farm rel. | Adopted | In force | Ratifications | What it requires for farm work | Likely drivers of adoption |
|---|
Each dot marks adoption, and the line runs to entry into force, so its length shows how long states took to bring an instrument into effect. Lanes group norms by tier (global, regional, national) and, within the global and regional tiers, into binding and soft law. Dot color shows binding quality. Click a dot to open the entry.
187 states scored on 13 farm-relevant treaties. Click a row to open the country profile, or tick up to four countries to compare them.
Ratifying a treaty is a promise. This section shows how each country has turned the frameworks and standards it accepted into national law, and where the law falls short. Pick a country to see each instrument, the laws that implement it and our assessment.
Assessment by the Institute for Migrant Rights, October 2026, for discussion. Before citing it, check the latest comments of the ILO Committee of Experts (NORMLEX) and the concluding observations of the UN treaty bodies.
Key decisions of regional courts, national supreme courts and ILO and UN bodies. Each decision is linked to the norms it applies, which you can open from here or find in a norm's profile.
For the full collection of decisions, with Indonesian summaries and downloads, see Court Decisions.
The main routes Indonesian migrant workers take, and the law that protects them at each end. Pick a destination on the map or in the list.
IMR summary, October 2026. Taiwan and Hong Kong are not separate parties to UN or ILO treaties. Check current rules with BP2MI and the destination's labor ministry.
Pick up to four countries to see their ratifications side by side, along with the national and EU laws in the Atlas that apply to them.
Ask your own questions of the country data: compare groups of countries and see which pairs differ, check whether two measures move together, see which factors still matter once others are held constant, or follow how fast countries ratify a treaty. Every answer sets out the null and alternative hypotheses, the test used, the p-value and whether the null hypothesis is rejected at the significance level you choose, with a 95% interval and a plain reading. You can also take the p-value from a permutation test, which reshuffles the data thousands of times instead of assuming a random sample.
Download the Atlas data for your own research. Tables come as CSV files, which open in Excel, Google Sheets or any statistics package. The full dataset is also available as one JSON file.
Institute for Migrant Rights, Migration Law Atlas, including the Farmworker Norms Atlas (version of 30 October 2026). Ratification data from ILO NORMLEX and the UN Treaty Collection.
Scores and the "likely drivers" are analytical judgments by the Atlas authors. Check live ratification status with ILO NORMLEX and the UN Treaty Collection before citing a count.
New laws, court rulings and ratifications in migration and farmworker law, newest first. Each item links to its source.
We send a short note when a new law, court ruling or ratification changes migration or farmworker law. You can unsubscribe at any time. You can also follow the RSS feed.
Each norm gets a binding-quality score and two relevance scores, all from 1 to 5. Its rank is binding quality multiplied by the relevance for the scope you are viewing (maximum 25). With All migration law selected, the Atlas uses migration relevance (RM). With Farmworker law only, it uses farm relevance (R), so a binding farm-specific convention outranks both a binding general treaty and a farm-specific guideline. Ties are broken by relevance, then by date. Norms are ranked separately within each tier.
The farmworker subset contains every norm in the original Farmworker Norms Atlas, plus migration instruments with a farm relevance of 3 or more. The migration view leaves out norms whose relevance to migrants is only indirect (RM 1), such as pesticide codes.
| Binding quality (B) | |
| 5 | Treaty or EU legislation in force, binding on parties, with a supervisory body |
| 4 | Binding but weakened: an outdated or superseded convention, adopted but not yet applicable, or an obligation that arises from ILO membership itself |
| 3 | Authoritative interpretation of a binding treaty (general comments, court judgments) or a declaration widely treated as customary law |
| 2 | Intergovernmental soft law: recommendations, declarations, guidelines, codes of practice |
| 1 | Private or multi-stakeholder standard, enforceable only through contracts or certification |
| Migration relevance (RM) | |
| 5 | The whole instrument is about migration, migrants, refugees or nationality |
| 4 | A dedicated chapter on migrants, or a central application to them (trafficking, recruitment, non-refoulement) |
| 3 | A general instrument with an explicit clause on non-nationals or migrant workers |
| 2 | A general standard that covers migrants by its scope |
| 1 | Indirect relevance only |
| Farm relevance (R) | |
| 5 | The whole instrument is about agricultural or plantation work |
| 4 | A dedicated rural or agricultural chapter, or a sector where farm work dominates |
| 3 | A general instrument with an explicit agriculture clause or a central farm application |
| 2 | A general labor or human-rights standard that covers farmworkers by its scope |
| 1 | Indirect relevance only |
| Issuer authority (A), publications only | |
| 5 | Output of an ILO or UN supervisory mechanism, or an official global estimate |
| 4 | Intergovernmental agency or UN special-procedure report; official government inquiry or statistics |
| 3 | Peer-reviewed scholarship or academic monograph |
| 2 | NGO or trade-union investigation |
| 1 | Journalism or documentary |
Each state is scored on 13 instruments. Six are farm-specific ILO conventions, which count double: C11, C99, C110, C129, C141 and C184. Seven are farm-relevant: C169, C170, C181, C190, P29, the ICESCR and the Migrant Workers Convention (ICRMW).
Each instrument a country has ratified, or that binds it, is assessed against four questions: Is there a national law that gives effect to it? Does that law cover everyone the instrument protects, including farmworkers, domestic workers and migrants in irregular status? Is it enforced, judging by inspection, prosecutions and the latest comments of ILO and UN supervisory bodies? Have those bodies asked for changes that remain open?
Implemented means yes to the first three with no major open request. Partly means a law exists but coverage or enforcement falls short. Gap means the law is missing, excludes a group the instrument protects, or is contradicted in practice. Law without ratification marks national law on a standard the state has not ratified. Recommendations are tagged with the Sustainable Development Goal targets they serve: 8.7 (forced and child labor), 8.8 (labor rights and safe work), 10.7 (safe and orderly migration) and 5 (gender equality).
The national tier covers a selection of frameworks chosen for the size of their migrant or hired farm workforce or the influence of their model. It is a selection, not a census. Two patterns stand out. Many founding labor statutes excluded farmworkers, and much later law exists to close those gaps. National reforms also tend to follow a single visible tragedy or strike.
The "likely drivers" column is an interpretive reading of each instrument's drafting history and political context. It does not quote the drafting records (travaux préparatoires).
Sources: ILO NORMLEX; UN Treaty Collection; Council of Europe Treaty Office; EUR-Lex; FAO, OECD and CFS publication records; scheme owners' standard documents; official national gazettes and codes. Ratification records collected 30 October 2026. Every per-instrument count matched the official total. Malaysia's separate Peninsular and Sarawak ratifications of C11 are counted once.
This atlas is built for empirical legal scholarship and socio-legal research on migration and the rights of migrant workers, as well as for advocacy.
The coded variables support statistical analysis in law: cross-national comparison, regression and event-history designs, and law and economics questions such as how recruitment fees, wage protection and limits on changing employer affect migrant workers. The data can be downloaded for replication.
Keywords: agricultural labor; farmworkers; ILO conventions; treaty ratification; legal indicators; empirical legal studies; empirical legal scholarship; quantitative legal research; statistical analysis in law; law and economics; law and economics of migration; comparative law; socio-legal studies; legal pluralism; migration law; labor migration; migrant workers’ rights; human rights law; access to justice; Global South; Asia; Africa; Middle East; Latin America; Indonesia; open data; replication data.