Court orders Home Office and Ministry of Justice to make payment to teenager attacked while being illegally detained at Morton Hall

A child trafficking victim has won £85,000 in compensation from the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice after he was sexually assaulted and illegally detained at Morton Hall immigration centre.

The Home Office must pay £82,000 to the Vietnamese national – known as H – after it admitted the teenager was being detained illegally when a fellow inmate attempted to rape him in his cell in 2016.

In addition to the Home Office payment, the Ministry of Justice has been ordered to pay £3,000 for failing to protect H while he was being detained, and for failing to launch an investigation following the assault.

The Home Office accepted during the case that it broke its own policies by continuing to detain H illegally for a further six months after the attack, despite having officially identified him as a victim of modern slavery at the time. It also continued to attempt to deport the teenager back to Vietnam.

According to clinical psychologists who assessed H during and after detention, he was left severely traumatised by the attack. They said the episode triggered memories of the rape and sexual violence H suffered at the hands of the criminal gang that trafficked him into cannabis cultivation in the UK in 2013.

H had disclosed that he was a victim of rape and human trafficking to doctors and staff at Morton Hall, but the centre’s management initially argued the attempted rape had not been regarded as a serious incident and H was not affected by the attack. The centre launched an investigation only after being contacted by lawyers from Duncan Lewis, who threatened legal action.

“Our client was a heartbeat away from being removed unlawfully by the home secretary, after he was falsely imprisoned for a year and subjected to sexual assault at Morton Hall immigration detention centre,” said Ahmed Aydeed, director of public law at Duncan Lewis.

“These horrific immigration detention centres deprive people of their liberty, strip them of their humanity and expose them to further abuse. They have no basis in a civilised society, and people will continue to suffer in them until the nation wakes up to the injustice of immigration detention.”

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Trafficked from Vietnam at the age of 17, H was subjected to severe sexual and physical violence and debt bondage before being forced to tend cannabis plants in an empty property in Chesterfield for three months. When the house was raided by police and H was found locked inside, he was charged with cannabis cultivation and sentenced to eight months in Glen Parva young offenders institution. He was transferred directly from incarceration to Morton Hall in Lincolnshire.

Earlier this year, the court of appeal overturned H’s conviction for cannabis cultivation. The Crown Prosecution Service has also admitted that H should never have been prosecuted. The CPS acknowledged he should instead have been recognised as a potential child trafficking victim and his case passed on to the National Referral Mechanism, the system that identifies and provides support to victims of modern slavery in the UK.

A government spokesperson said: “The welfare of vulnerable detainees is of the utmost importance, and we are carefully considering the implications of this case.

“We have made significant improvements in recent years, but following Stephen Shaw’s second review, the home secretary made clear that we are committed to going further and faster in exploring alternatives to detention, increasing transparency around it and improving the support available for vulnerable detainees.”