This paper explores the legal trajectory of women’s labour and mobility between 1890-1910 in Eastern Mediterranean, during a period of successive humanitarian legislation against unfree labour. I will explore how and why international legislation that sought to liberate women from degrading forms of work - domestic slavery and sex trade - did so only by curtailing their right to locomation. Between the Brussels Congress on the Abolition of African Slavery [1890] and the Paris Convention against ‘Traite des Blanches’[1910], the transnational mobility of working class women engendered moral and legal debates so as to the duty to rescue them from the degradations of sex and enslavement. Two patterns of humanitarian rescue emerged in Eastern Mediterranean whereby - African, black, local - women were rehabilitated from domestic slavery and subsumed back into the household as unwaged or undervalued servants, while - European, white, foreign - women were repatriated and prevented entry into a transnational labour market. Humanitarian rescue efforts thus penalised women’s mobility, while advancing the exclusionary and exploitative tenets of racial capitalism. In my presentation I will juxtapose two court cases from French and Ottoman archives, of two women fleeing their respective saviors. I will then proceed to explain how cross-cultural precepts underlying extraterritorial jurisdiction concluded a stalemate in between Ottoman authorities and European consular officers, through which the conditions of domestic and erotic labour remained beyond the purview of international legislation. Instead, the legislation against ‘African Slavery' on one hand, and ‘White Slave Trafficking’ on the other, only served to limit women’s right to locomation in ways that upheld racial reproduction and patriarchal domination on both sides of the 'civilisational divide'. In conclusion, I will argue for a comparative and transnational historiography that goes beyond culturalist frameworks regarding the study of unfree labour.