Assessing compliance of the Mongolian armed forces with ILO Conventions Nos. 29 and 105 on forced labour

In the past decades Mongolia has made a successful transition into a multi-party democracy and a rapidly growing, if not highly diversified, market economy. The Mongolian economy is increasingly integrated into global markets, in particular through trade and investment liberalization schemes with major trading partners including the European Union and the United States. The planned economy era has however left a legacy of certain practices that still raise concerns among international and national human rights bodies and Mongolia’s trade partners alike. One such practice is involving military conscripts in non-military work and economic development.

The ILO Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29) defines forced labour as “All work or service that is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily”. However, it includes some exceptions and establishes that compulsory military service for work of a purely military character does not constitute forced labour. The condition of a “purely military character”, aimed specifically at preventing the call-up of conscripts for public works, has its corollary in Article 1(b) of the Abolition of Forced Labour Convention, 1957 (No. 105), which prohibits the use of forced or compulsory labour “as a method of mobilizing and using labour for purposes of economic development”.

Work of a purely military character is defined as all tasks justifiable in the pursuit of national defence. However, specific circumstances remain outside the scope of Convention No. 29:

• conscripts, like any other citizens, may be called to work in cases of emergency;
• conscripts performing their service in engineering or similar units may be made to join in the building of roads and bridges as a part of their military training;
• conscripts provided with general education and vocational training to facilitate resettlement in civilian life may be called to work if these arrangements present the characteristics of training schemes. (ILO 1979, 2007).

Mongolia ratified Conventions Nos. 29 and 105 in 2005. In 2019, the Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations (CEACR) requested “the Government to take the necessary measures to amend its legislation in order to ensure that any work or service exacted by virtue of compulsory military service laws are of purely military nature, so as to be in conformity with the Convention. Pending the revision, the Committee requests the Government to provide information on the number of conscripts assigned to participate in non-military work” (ILO 2021). Subsequently, in 2022, the CEACR requested the Government “to provide information on the conditions under which career members of the armed forces may leave the service, in time of peace, at their own request, and to indicate the number of applications to resign that have been accepted or refused” (ILO 2023).

In response to these direct requests, the ILO supported research on the working conditions of conscripts and career members of the armed force to assess compliance with Convention No. 29. In 2022, the National Statistics Office of Mongolia (NSO), with support from the ILO, piloted a module in the Labour Force Survey to assess forced labour, including a section to measure forced labour among men who have recently completed their compulsory military service.1 The results from the survey indicate that 7.27 per cent of those performing their military service during the reference period (the last three years) were involved in non-military work during their conscription and none of them was performing this work as a response as an emergency (880 conscripts). Of those performing non-military work, 29.77 per cent (or 262 individuals) were doing so while in compulsory training and can therefore be classified as in forced labour. For the others, as it was not possible to ascertain if the non-military work was related to the specialization of their military unit or voluntary training, their non-military work cannot be classified as forced labour.

Given the limitations of the survey, additional research combining quantitative and qualitative methods was conducted by the National Research and Consulting Centre (NRCC) and the International Labour Organisation to assess compliance with Conventions Nos. 29 and 105. The results from this research are presented in this report.