Everything looked great on paper: Basi was to spend six months planting trees in a forest in northern Sweden for the company Skogsnicke AB. For eight hours a day, five days a week, Basi was promised a salary, before tax, of 18,500 kronor a month (US$2,200).

Five months of work would earn Basi enough money to buy a piece of land and start a farm back home, which he, his wife and their five children could live on comfortably.

Today, more than four years after his arrival, Basi is still in Sweden.

He has neither a job nor a permit to stay, yet he cannot go back to Cameroon. Since he hasn’t been able to pay back the loan he took to come to Sweden, he runs the risk of being put in prison upon his return.

Most of his fellow countrymen and co-workers from the forest are in a similar situation. “I don’t even know what I will eat this afternoon. But I stay with a friend now who gives me food,” Basi tells Equal Times.

But there is a glimmer of hope for Basi, who has decided to sue his former employer, Niklas Gotthardsson, for fraud.

His lawyer, Bo Villner, believes they have a good chance of winning the case, which is strongly backed by the GS union, representing forest and wood workers, and by other lawyers who have been hired by six other Cameroonian workers.

In Sweden, it is possible to bring migrant workers to the labour market on the basis of a non-binding job offer. While this regulation was introduced in the name of flexibility, some trade union activists claim it leaves the door open to fraudulent recruitment schemes in which workers have no protection against the changes made to the initial offer.

When Basi and the 15 other men came to Sweden in May 2011, it immediately became clear that the job was nothing like what had been described on the contract they had signed with Gotthardsson in Cameroon.

Basi and others would be woken up every day at 5 a.m. to be transported to the forest by their supervisor. There, they would plant trees and carry loads of tree plants on their backs, weighing up to 70 kilos, all day without any breaks.

The never-setting sun of the Swedish summer allowed the work to continue until late at night, and they were housed in a small cottage with neither beds nor hot water.

Gotthardsson and his lawyers did not respond to Equal Times’ request for comments.

No protection for foreign workers

At the end of the first month the workers didn’t receive their salary.

Gotthardsson told them this was due to a problem with their bank accounts. After a few more months, however, the Cameroonians only received one small payment. It was at that point that they realised they were being tricked.

“Everybody was very angry and crying, because we had all borrowed money to come here. But our employer told us we should stay calm and work in 2012, and then we would have our money,” says Basi. He and the other workers saw no other way but to hope their employer was telling the truth and stay in Sweden until the next planting season.

Once again, the workers did not receive the salary they had been promised, which prompted Basi and others to contact the GS union. They were subsequently threatened by their employer who, in an email, wrote that he will burn down their houses in Cameroon. Nevertheless, the workers stood by their accusations.

“Foreign workers are without protection because they get their work permits based on the employment they have,” says Villner, who works for the Swedish Trade Union Confederation and the Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees (LO-TCO). “If they report their employer and it turns out the premises under which they got their work permit was false, they lose their work permit and must leave the country. It’s that simple,” he adds.

These problems often occur, Villner stresses, describing the exploitation of foreign workers in other sectors like berry-picking or nail polishing.

Every now and then, cases are brought to the attention of the media, but it has proven hard to bring justice to the victims.

This case could set a precedent. Never has an employer been sued for fraud – let alone human trafficking – for bringing foreign workers to Sweden under false premises. One difficulty is the fact that the workers themselves are seldom members of a union and are usually too afraid to take legal action.

“If we win the case it would provide other people with evidence of how to act in such circumstances,” says Villner.

Basi hopes he can get financial compensation and return to his family in Cameroon. “I feel very, very bad that I can’t support my family.” he says.

“My wife had to close down her business, and some of my children are not going to school anymore, since we can’t pay the school fees.”

Tackling human trafficking

Lawyers like Villner say there are systemic changes needed in order to prevent the exploitation of foreign workers in the future. “There should be special legal help provided for these people, or the unions should be able to handle these cases even if the workers are not union members. Moreover, the letter of employment that’s approved by the migration board beforehand should be legally binding.”

The GS union sees what happened to the Cameroonians as a case of human trafficking and forced labour. “They were lured into coming here with promises of gold and green forests, but the reality was very different,” says Tommy Andersson, vice-chairman of GS union, using a common Swedish metaphor.

However, the legal requirements to back this type of accusation are hard to present in court, according to Villner.

“The procedural requirements for human trafficking are hard to fulfil. In this case it cannot be said that the men were put in a state of emergency. Even though they had to live in primitive circumstances they would have been able to quit the employment. It would have been different if Skogsnicke AB had confiscated their passports or locked them up.”

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) believes this view is not up-to-date with current realities.

“According to human trafficking indicators developed by the ILO, the combination of withholding wages, debt bondage and threats of violence can constitute coercion, even in the absence of passport confiscation or physical confinement”, says Zuzanna Muskat-Gorska, policy advisor at the ITUC.

“National courts often tend to look only for physical signs of coercion –workers chained to the walls, locked up or beaten. Labour laws such as those against fraud provide with useful legal strategies to address abuses but we should also challenge conservative interpretations of anti-trafficking laws in order to tackle the severe exploitation of increasingly large groups of exploited migrant workers in mainstream economic activities.”

Cases of group exploitation take place all over Europe, according to the ITUC’s report, prepared with the financial support of the European Commission.

In 2014 the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted a new legally-binding protocol on forced labour, which aims to strengthen global efforts to eliminate modern-forms of forced labour.

A campaign was subsequently launched to encourage at least 50 countries to ratify the protocol by 2018.

The Swedish ILO committee has recommended the government to do so and to look at some aspects of the legislation, to make sure that they are compatible with the protocol and that stories like that of the Cameroonian forest workers remain the exception rather than the norm.