Article 4

Prohibition of slavery and forced labour: No-one shall be held in slavery or servitude. No-one shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour.

This right means that no-one is forced to perform work involuntarily; and the Article will be breached if the requirement to work is unjust or oppressive; or the work itself involves avoidable hardship.

This includes trafficking of human beings, an increasingly prevalent form of modern slavery.

What this means for local authorities

This article includes an obligation to put in place effective measures to protect victims of trafficking. Migrants in particular may be vulnerable to exploitation, and this includes women and children, as well as men. Local authorities have a general duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and young people in need, and should therefore be aware that where children in particular are at risk of trafficking, there is an obligation to protect them, regardless of immigration status or nationality.

Case law examples

• In CN v UK, the European Court of Human Rights, decided that the UK had not done enough to protect the claimant who came to the UK fleeing sexual and physical violence in Uganda. This was in circumstances where her passport was removed and she was engaged by an intermediary as a live-in carer for an elderly Iraqi couple who paid the intermediary and wrongly assumed that the pay was being passed to the claimant. At that time, while the police found evidence of trafficking for domestic servitude, this was not an offence in English criminal law.

• In contrast, the Supreme Court in Reilly and Jameson v Department for Work and Pensions concluded that the requirement to undertake work placement to retain jobseekers allowance came “no-where close to the type of exploitative conduct at which Article 4 is aimed”.