Mr DV

Mr DV, a Vietnamese national, was arrested in 2012 at a house which had been adapted for the purpose of growing cannabis plants. He was 17 years old at the time.

He pleaded guilty in the Youth Court to the production of cannabis and was sentenced to a six month Detention and Training Order.

Mr DV was prosecuted, convicted and sentenced in spite of the fact that material was available, during that process, which should have alerted the authorities concerned to the possibility that Mr DV was a child victim of human trafficking.

The material included a pre-sentence report that detailed Mr DV’s claims that he had been transported by lorry to Russia and France before arriving in the UK where was forced to grow cannabis and beaten when he tried to escape. In sentencing Mr DV, the Youth Court noted that he had been “exploited”.

Following his conviction, a bail officer at the Young Offenders Institution where he was detained applied, under the National Referral Mechanism, for Mr DV to be considered as a potential victim of human trafficking.

In October 2012, the UK Border Agency decided that there were conclusive grounds to believe that Mr DV was a victim of human trafficking, taking into account evidence that Vietnam was the number-one source country for potential victims of child trafficking into the UK and that children were trafficked primarily for the purposes of labour exploitation in cannabis-growing operations.

The CCRC received an application for review of the conviction in November 2012.

The CCRC decided to refer Mr DV’s conviction for an appeal at the Crown Court.

The referral was made on the basis that there was new evidence to show that Mr DV was a credible victim of human trafficking and was compelled to commit a criminal offence as a direct consequence of his trafficked situation.

In those circumstances, there was a real possibility that the Crown Court would vacate his guilty plea and find that it was an abuse of process to prosecute him without due regard to the UK’s obligations under Article 26 of the Trafficking Convention.

There was therefore a real possibility that Mr DV’s conviction would not be upheld.

The CCRC referred the conviction in March 2013.

The Crown Court quashed the conviction in August 2013.