MSF Report Flags 59 Abuse Cases in Chad: Legal Liability and Trafficking Concerns

For legal and compliance professionals, the report’s language of ‘organized sexual trafficking’ moves beyond institutional misconduct into the realm of criminal law. Questions of jurisdiction, evidence collection, and corporate accountability demand scrutiny as the aid sector confronts its own #MeToo moment.

The Associated Press has obtained a confidential internal report from Doctors Without Borders (MSF) documenting a pattern of sexual abuse and exploitation by staff working in refugee camps along the Chad–Sudan border. The report, completed in July 2025, details 59 allegations of misconduct, including instances where underage girls were targeted and food or jobs were traded for sex. Eighteen staff members were dismissed and permanently barred from future employment with the organization, though MSF acknowledged that some allegations could not be verified or perpetrators identified. The findings also raise the spectre of organized sexual trafficking, a term the report itself used to characterize some repeated patterns of exploitation.

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The Associated Press has obtained a confidential internal report from Doctors Without Borders (MSF) documenting a pattern of sexual abuse and exploitation by staff working in refugee camps along the Chad–Sudan border.

The investigation was launched months earlier in direct response to AP’s prior reporting that women in displacement sites had accused aid workers of sexual abuse. The new report explicitly credits AP as playing “a fundamental role as an external whistleblower.” This dynamic—where an external media outlet catalyzes an internal probe—underscores both the growing power of investigative journalism in holding humanitarian actors accountable and the persistent weaknesses in internal monitoring systems. MSF, one of the largest employers and aid providers in eastern Chad, is now confronting not only a reputational crisis but a fundamental breach of its organizational values.

Chad hosts hundreds of thousands of refugees who have fled Sudan’s devastating civil war, now in its fourth year. The camps are desperately overcrowded, with food and medical care provided almost exclusively by international NGOs. Within this context of profound vulnerability, aid workers hold extreme power over survival resources. The abuse documented in the report thus represents a catastrophic failure of the duty of care—the very principle MSF invokes to operate in conflict zones. Victims, already traumatized by war, were exploited by those entrusted to protect them, deepening the humanitarian crisis.

For the broader humanitarian sector, this report reignites concerns that first gained global attention after the 2018 Oxfam Haiti sex scandal. Since then, many organizations have overhauled safeguarding policies, established whistleblower hotlines, and adopted stricter vetting procedures. Yet MSF’s case suggests that even well-resourced and highly regarded agencies remain vulnerable when operating in remote, lawless environments with insufficient oversight. The involvement of both local and foreign staff, and the report’s mention of potential trafficking networks, implies that the problem is not simply a series of individual misdeeds but may reflect organized exploitation that capitalized on systemic gaps.