Home Office wrong to exclude kidnapping victim from trafficking protections

The High Court has quashed a decision by the Home Office to refuse a trafficking claim on the grounds that the person had been kidnapped, which the decision maker said could not meet the trafficking definition. The case is R (AAM) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025] EWHC 447 (Admin).

Background

The claimant is a 24 year old Syrian national. He left Syria on 31 July 2021 under threat of forced conscription into the Syrian Army and travelled to Libya. He was abducted in Libya, along with others, and his money and phone were taken and he was held captive for a month between August and September 2021.

The captives were told that they would not be released until a ransom of $7,000 per person was paid. The claimant spoke to his family who said they could not afford to pay this and so the demand was reduced to $4,000.

While other people were on the phone to their family to ask for a ransom, the captors would beat the claimant so that his cries could heard over the phone, to encourage payment of the ransom. The same was done to others when he was on the phone to his family.

In addition to the frequent beatings, the claimant was kept tied up and was not given enough food or water. The claimant was released during the fourth week and believes that his parents paid around $1,500 to secure his release.

The claimant then travelled to the UK where he claimed asylum on 16 May 2022. He was detained, his claim was deemed inadmissible and he was given removal directions for Rwanda. Those decisions were quashed by the Divisional Court on 17 January 2023.

The claimant was referred into the National Referral Mechanism for consideration of whether he was a potential victim of trafficking and a negative reasonable grounds (first stage) decision was made on 24 November 2022.

A request for reconsideration was made on 19 December 2022 and this included medical evidence and an expert report dated 8 December 2022 provided by Dr Aidan McQuade, a former director of Anti-Slavery International. Dr McQuade concluded that the claimant’s experiences fell within the definition of trafficking in the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings (“ECAT”).

On 12 January 2023 the Home Secretary again decided that there were no reasonable grounds to conclude that the claimant was a victim of trafficking.

There are three elements to the definition of trafficking, the first is that there must be movement or recruitment, secondly, deception or coercion must have been used (the ‘means’), and the third element is that this must have been done for the purpose of exploitation. The claimant’s account was accepted, however the decision maker said that because the claimant was not subjected to forced labour, the ‘purpose’ element of the trafficking definition was not met.

The judicial review

The claimant sought judicial review of that decision, submitting that the Home Secretary had misdirected herself as to the meaning of the term “exploitation”. The court agreed, concluding that the Home Secretary’s approach to the definition of exploitation was too narrow, pointing out that kidnapping is expressly referred to in regulation 3(5)(a)(ii) of the Slavery and Human Trafficking (Definition of Victim) Regulations 2022.

The court said:

50. By r.3(5)(ii) of the 2022 Regulations, Parliament recognised and intended that the act of kidnap (defined in the OED as “carry off (a person etc.) by illegal force or fraud esp. to obtain a ransom”) is a means capable of leading to exploitation of a person for the purposes of r.3(6). Under the regulations the kidnap of a person is one of the means by which a person can be exploited by being “subjected to force, threats or deception designed to induce” that person “to provide services of any kind; to provide another person with benefits of any kind, or to enable another person to acquire benefits of any kind.” To conclude otherwise would render the inclusion of the word “kidnap” in r.3(5)(ii) otiose. Parliament would not have used the term kidnap, which given its ordinary meaning includes the possibility of being ransomed, as one of the means by which a person could be exploited so as to render them a victim of trafficking if that means was not capable, in any circumstances, of fulfilling the purpose of exploitation.

The court said that it was “plain” that kidnap for ransom can “be for the purpose of or with a view to exploitation such that the victim of kidnap for ransom is a victim of trafficking as defined by Art 4 of ECAT and r.3 of the 2022 Regulations”. The court was careful to point out that whether or not the person actually is a victim of trafficking will depend on the facts of the individual case.

On the facts of the claimant’s case, the court said:

the Claimant is required to demonstrate only that his kidnap was undertaken with a view to exploiting him and that he was subjected to force, threats or deception designed to induce him to enable his kidnappers to acquire a benefit. It is clear from the Defendant’s decision that there was no consideration by the Defendant at all of whether the action (the arrangement or facilitation of travel by another person pursuant to r.3(1)) and the means (kidnap pursuant to r.3(5)(ii)) accepted by the Defendant as having befallen the Claimant was for the purpose of or with a view to his exploitation for the purposes of r.3(6).

The decision was quashed and will need to be remade.

Conclusion

While the court reiterated again at the end of the decision that whether or not kidnapping amounts to exploitation in a given case will be fact specific, decision makers should no longer be issuing refusals saying that kidnapping cannot meet the ‘purpose’ element of the trafficking definition. The claimant’s experiences in Libya are not unusual and so this decision is likely to impact many other people.

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