5 the lack of any forms of protection in the country of destination; and to the lack of knowledge of the local language and their rights. Lacking access to free or affordable legal aid, when migrant workers denounce cases of wage theft, they rarely reach court. When cases are brought to the attention of authorities, in many cases embassies, official responses tend to be excessively slow17 and procedures inappropriate, with a likely outcome of the case being ultimately dropped when the employer has no intention to remedy the violation.18 If other complaint mechanisms exist in the country of destination, they are often inadequate and ineffective. An imbalance in the power relation between employer and employee as well as between country of origin and country of destination, flawed national legislations leaving serious gaps in the protection of migrant workers’ rights, and overall faulty justice systems result in migrant workers paying the price for a world devised to leave the poor and most vulnerable exposed to and unprotected from abuses and violations. The continuous lack of adequate mechanisms that allow low-wage migrant workers to speedily and effectively pursue their claims, in countries of destination and even once back home, thus evidences a dangerous risk of a continued exploitative pattern among employers as well as of significant justice violations that remain unaddressed. The existence and adoption of international agreements and of international standards is not enough to effectively address and eradicate the issue of wage theft. How Wage Theft Undermines the Positive Impact of Remittances When working abroad migrant workers from low- and middle-income countries send money back home. That money, remittances, is used by the household to improve their living conditions and their access to basic services: remittances are a powerful resource in poverty alleviation and facilitate development. In 2019, the total amount of remittances surpassed for the first time the total amount of Foreign Debt Investments19 to low- and middle-income countries, a significant threshold that shows the importance that the money earned by migrant workers holds in their country of origin. The World Bank has predicted that, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the flow of remittances will decrease by an average of 20 percent in 2020, with certain individual countries likely to experience an even greater share in the decrease of remittances in-flow.20 This significant downsizing of money flows is likely to result not only from an increase in the unemployment rates of migrant workers, but also from a unilateral renegotiation of migrant workers’ salaries and lack of payments. In other words, a substantial share of the decline in remittances projected for this year could be attributed to wage theft. The reduction in the flow of remittances is projected to have extremely negative consequences for millions of individuals: families are now back at risk of poverty and food insecurity, with a real risk of undoing the progress achieved so far and serious humanitarian consequences. Wage theft is thus not only stealing money. It is, among others, stealing people’s ability to escape poverty and access to basic 17 Justice delayed is justice denied. Importantly, embassies cannot replace rule of law. See Panel Discussion:Transitional Justice:Towards “Building Back Better”, YouTube, streamed on 21 July 2020 19Remittance flows surpassed Official Development Assistance money in the late 1990s. See Figure: KNOMAD, Remittances and other external inflows, n.d. 20 World Bank, World Bank Predicts Sharpest Decline of Remittances in Recent History, Press Release (no. 2020/175/SPJ), April 22, 2020; 18