'Law, race, rights and the fight against human trafficking and modern slavery'

Professor Parosha Chandran is a distinguished, multi-award winning human rights barrister at One Pump Court Chambers in London, a specialist in modern slavery law, and a world-leading expert on the law relating to human trafficking, including for the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the British Parliament’s work for Commonwealth States.

She represents victims of modern slavery and human trafficking in their cases and during her 26-year legal career she has set critical trafficking precedents in the Courts with national and global reach, most recently in a landmark judgment on non-punishment of the European Court of Human Rights in 2021, VCL and AN v UK, which concerned trafficked Vietnamese minors wrongly convicted of cannabis cultivation which their traffickers had required them to perform.

She works closely with NGOs and international organisations, provides trafficking training, including for judges, lawyers NGOs and prosecutors, and has advised on domestic and international legislation, including aspects of the Modern Slavery Act 2015. She has published two books, including ‘The Human Trafficking Handbook: Recognising Trafficking and Modern-Day Slavery in the UK’ (LexisNexis, 2011). She is a co-author of the Council of Europe’s comprehensive e-learning course on ‘Combatting Human Trafficking’ (2018 & 2023 edition publication pending).

In 2015 she received the ‘Trafficking in Persons Hero Award’ from John Kerry and the Obama administration for her outstanding work in the field. In 2018 she received the distinction of being appointed the first Professor of Practice in Modern Slavery Law at King’s College London where she teaches her own LLM course. In 2021 she represented the UN Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons in two cases of significance, including in her third party intervention in the Supreme Court in Basfar and Wong, which lifted the diplomatic veil of immunity in a global landmark case concerning a female migrant domestic worker trafficked into the UK for exploitation.

Many of her landmark legal cases have involved critical issues concerning race and gender and she highlights these and bring her personal observations on how these impacted victim protection in her talk.

This lecture was delivered at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, on 11 May 2023 as part of the series of Law and Race talks.

Supported by the Centre for Public Law: https://www.cpl.law.cam.ac.uk/