A slave in Scotland | Hacker News Reader

A slave in Scotland

theguardian.com

125 pointsorf18 comments

He was jailed, but how come the missing wages, overtime, and compensation weren't awarded at the same time? This should all have been dealt in a single sentencing. It would have been both fair for the victims and efficient for the justice system.

There was a similar case for a pizzeria employee in Finland. An Indian worker was tricked into country and forced to work extra long days with no holidays, for 16 months. The place owners got jail time and prohibition to run a business. The employee got 90k€ in missing wages plus 12k€ in compensation for the suffering.

That was my persistent thought as I was reading the article. How is it even remotely possible that the legal system did not see the trafficked men as victims here? It was prosecuted as if Arefin's sole crime was against the state, and the men he effectively enslaved were merely witnesses. (Which is also more or less how it was treated by the first few authorities it was reported to.)

As a Scot I'm deeply embarrassed about how these men were treated. Unfortunately, although Scotland has a devolved parliament, immigration and border control isn't a devolved power. I'd like to think that if these powers were devolved, or in an independent Scotland, the Scottish equivalent of the UK Borders Agency/Home Office would have treated these folks far more sympathetically.

Whilst nowhere near as horrific as Azad and his colleagues experience, there's currently a high profile story in the press about an Australian couple and their son who've lived here since 2011. The UK government changed the visa rules and now want to kick them out:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-3638...

One day I hope we can gain these powers and treat law abiding guests in our country with much better respect.

I like the idea that "civilization is the process of setting man free from men". Unfortunately immigration law based on sponsorship is rather obviously pulling in the other direction...

We have trouble with this in the US.

One big problem is employers holding passports. That's illegal in the US, but widespread. This would be easy to fix. Since the US takes biometrics on legal immigrants entering the country, anyone legally in the US should be able to go to any place with a TSA/ICE presence (any airport), get a fingerprint/retina/photo scan, and get an immediate temporary ID.

I would absolutely love to see this happen. I wish there was a govt user voice where people would vote for their ideas and those with the most votes in a department would have to be looked at.

We seem to have a democracy but the only decision we can make is which man/woman leads the country.

Horrible. One aspect of this story is that these men are still slaves, though their masters are now moneylenders and the whole thing seems kind of legal... Modern day slavery.

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