An invaluable, unique and necessary moral achievement, it is voluntary. Many (sometimes a majority of) health workers move freely without recruitment, as they do in Samoa and Tonga, and the code can never be a panacea (partly because it excludes the private sector), it is a ‘soft law’ that needs to be monitored carefully. Implicit in the code is that all countries should train adequate numbers of health workers for their own nations - a task that poses enormous problems for many.