Amnesty UK Submission to Home Affairs Committee on Human Trafficking

The submission identifies specific features of the asylum and immigration systems that create, exacerbate and maintain vulnerability to human trafficking.

It highlights that control is at the heart of human trafficking and emphasizes the way asylum and immigration policy enables this by the degree to which it disempowers the people over which it exerts control. The irony of this is that even while law and policy-makers decry the flourishing of human trafficking, and related exploitation, they pursue asylum and immigration policies that tend to exaggerate rather than mitigate this disempowerment - thereby enabling the very abuse they are formally committed to ending.