This focused and informative seminar from one of the Law Friends stalwarts, Raphael Jesurum, will give you a vital refresher of what trafficking is and the process by which victims are identified, and then give you some tools to better prepare your cases and review some of the types of challenges, and recent developments in the case law.

The obligation to tackle trafficking in human beings comes from the 2005 Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, which was ratified by the United Kingdom in 2009.

The Trafficking Convention contains definitions and a series of obligations. The purpose of the convention is set out in Article 1 and its scope in Article 2. The definition of trafficking is set out in Article 4.

The Trafficking Convention sets out a series of obligations in Chapter III. Broadly, these are:

Article 10 - identification of victims

Article 11 - protects private life and personal data

Article 12 - obligations to provide assistance to victims

Article 13 - creates a recovery and reflection period of at least 30 days

Article 14 - allows for the grant of Residence Permits

Article 15 covers the right to compensation and legal redress, including the right to legal aid

Relevant cases

R (Galdikas) v SSHD [2016] 1 WLR 4031

PK(Ghana) v SSHD [2018] EWCA Civ 98

R (EOG) v SSHD [2020] EWHC 3310 (Admin)

Bio

Raphael practises in asylum, immigration and nationality law. He appears regularly in the Upper Tribunal, the Administrative Court and the Court of Appeal.

Raphael's main interest is strategic litigation: working in partnership with solicitors to identify new legal points, training caseworkers to spot them, and advising early in order to test the issues on appeal. The aim is to build cases with overwhelmingly strong evidence, and develop arguments to test and change the law.

An example is the successful campaign to secure settlement rights for the children of Gurkha veterans. Before coming to the bar, Raphael was a successful broadcaster and foreign correspondent, working for the BBC and other international news outlets. He reported on the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the Albanian uprising in 1997 and separatist violence in Macedonia.