Here is a question that sounds easy. If armed men kidnap you, hold you for a month and beat you while you phone your family to pass on their ransom demands, have you been exploited?
The Home Office said no. That is what a young Syrian man, known in court as AAM, says happened to him in Libya in 2021, and the department accepted he had been kidnapped. What it would not accept was that he had been exploited, because nobody had made him work. This article examines the legal definition of "exploitation" in UK trafficking law, and why reading it too narrowly strips protection from people Parliament meant to cover.
The story
According to the Court of Appeal's judgment, AAM was abducted in August 2021 while travelling between Benghazi and Tripoli, and held for about a month. His captors demanded $7,000 per person, made him phone his family to relay their demands, and beat him during the calls. His family eventually paid around $1,500 through a third party.
He reached the UK by small boat in May 2022 and was referred to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM), the government's system for identifying modern slavery victims. In January 2023 the Home Office decided there were not even "reasonable grounds" (the low, first-stage threshold) to believe he was a trafficking victim. It accepted he had been held by force. Its objection was purpose: he had not been made to work or provide services.
In March 2025 the High Court quashed that decision as too narrow. On 4 November 2026, the Court of Appeal (Lord Justice Lewis, with Lord Justices Edis and Bean agreeing) dismissed the Home Secretary's appeal.
The definition
In law, trafficking has three ingredients: an action (moving or harbouring someone), a means (force, deception, abduction and so on) and a purpose, which is exploitation. That structure comes from the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (ECAT). Article 4 says exploitation "shall include, at a minimum" forms such as forced labour, slavery, sexual exploitation and organ removal.
At home, section 3 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 defines exploitation for the criminal offence, and the definition used to decide who counts as a victim sits in regulation 3 of the Slavery and Human Trafficking (Definition of Victim) Regulations 2022. Both contain the wording that proved decisive. A person is exploited if subjected to force, threats or deception designed to induce them to provide services, to provide another person with benefits, or "to enable another person to acquire benefits of any kind".
Notice what that last limb does not say. It does not mention work.
The shift and the debate
The Home Office's case was principled, not callous. Kidnap for ransom is not on ECAT's minimum list. The Explanatory Memorandum to the 2022 Regulations suggests they were meant to align with those international obligations. And it was the captivity, not the phone calls, that produced the money, so treating the calls as "services" was artificial. Counsel also warned this reading could sweep in kidnappings merely incidental to someone's journey.
The court disagreed. ECAT sets a floor, not a ceiling. The Explanatory Memorandum, Lewis LJ found, gave no clear steer either way, so the answer lay in the words Parliament approved. On their natural reading, a kidnapper who uses threats to make a victim help secure a ransom may be inducing that victim to enable someone else to acquire a benefit. The kidnapping, the court concluded, "may, depending on the facts, be exploitation within the meaning of regulation 3(6)(d)(iii)."
Two limits matter. The court did not say every kidnap is trafficking, and it left harder cases, such as kidnaps during people smuggling, for another day. Nor has AAM been recognised as a victim: his claim goes back to the Home Office to be decided properly.
After the High Court ruling, Jeremy Bloom of Duncan Lewis Solicitors, who represent AAM, called the Home Office's approach "unlawful, unfair, and inhumane". When the Regulations were drafted, the Anti Trafficking and Labour Exploitation Unit warned they would narrow the definition of a victim. This judgment suggests the words themselves are wider than the department's reading of them.
Why the words matter
Why fuss over a label? Because labels are gateways. Recognition under the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 unlocks a recovery period, support and protection from removal. Read a definition more narrowly than its text allows, and you do not just misdescribe someone's suffering. You switch off the protections attached to it.
The Home Office's worry about overreach is fair, and the court was wise to leave the edges open. But the answer to an uncertain boundary is case-by-case judgment, not quietly reading words out of a definition. Parliament approved "benefits of any kind". Decision-makers should take it at its word.