End of October the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) unanimously ruled against Slovakian authorities for failing to conduct a thorough investigation into credible allegations of human trafficking.
The case concerns a former victim of human trafficking, B.B., who was brought up in an orphanage in Slovakia. Upon leaving the orphanage, B.B. was exploited by a family who sold her into trafficking in the UK in 2010, where she was sexually exploited. The NGO Caritas Slovakia formally identified her as a victim of trafficking and asked the police to open a criminal investigation into her case.
Slovakian authorities charged and convicted B.B.’s exploiter with pimping rather than human trafficking, leading to her removal from the specialist care for trafficking victims provided by Caritas Slovakia. With support from lawyers and an NGO, B.B. contested this reclassification, arguing that the authorities’ failure to investigate the human trafficking charge and reducing it to pimping violated her rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, including Article 4.
The case was brought to the ECHR with a legal team led by Parosha Chandran, a renowned barrister and global authority on human trafficking and labour exploitation. The Court identified major flaws in the domestic proceedings, noting the Slovak authorities’ failure to take all reasonable steps to gather evidence and their lack of understanding of the subtle ways individuals can be controlled by others. Consequently, the Court awarded the applicant €26,000 in compensation, along with legal costs.
This is another big victory after the recent ruling of the ECHR against Spain, where the ECHR determined that Spain’s inadequate implementation of crucial criminal law provisions, constituted a violation of its procedural duty under Article 4 of the ECHR.