Forced Labour in UK Law

In seeking to achieve a fair outcome, there is no place for discrimination between husband and wife and their respective roles. If, in their different spheres, each contributed equally to the family, then in principle it matters not which of them earned the money and built up the assets.

Where "forced or compulsory labour" is concerned, the menace of a penalty can be exerted in various ways. Constraint can be mental or physical. Where it is alleged that one person has been compulsorily employed by another, the level of pay he or she has received, if any, may have evidential importance. It may point to coercion; it may bear on an employee's ability to escape from his or her employer's control. On its own, however, a derisory level of wages is not tantamount to coercion.

The problem has been with us for some time, and has been growing. Unhappily different forms of exploitation are found in the sex industry, the construction industry, agriculture and residential care. Nevertheless, this legislation, too did not address the entire problem. The end result was that many men and women continued to remain vulnerable to exploitation without any counter-balancing protection against exploitation.

Sentences in this class of case must make clear, not merely that the statutory minimum wage should not be undermined, but much more important, that every vulnerable victim of exploitation will be protected by the criminal law, and they must also emphasise that there is no victim, so vulnerable to exploitation, that he or she somehow becomes invisible or unknown to or somehow beyond the protection of the law.

(56) In addition, in its assessment that the Appellant worked due to economic necessity, the Authority failed to recognise that this was not inconsistent with continuing exploitation, manipulation and forced labour. Further, the Authority placed disproportional weight on the failure of this frightened, isolated mid-teenager recently exposed to the culture and language of an alien country to make a formal complaint to the police.

It is of course open to member states to provide for rights more generous than those guaranteed by the Convention, but such provision should not be the product of interpretation of the Convention by national courts, since the meaning of the Convention should be uniform throughout the states party to it. The duty of national courts is to keep pace with the Strasbourg jurisprudence as it evolves over time: no more, but certainly no less.

This decision could be said to be questionable in that Ms Farrell appears to have accepted AS's account of what actually happened to him namely that he was kept captive and required to work until "the debt" was repaid. Although this appears on any view to be "forced labour", Ms Farrell seems to think that it would only be forced labour if suffered by someone under 18.