Geoffrey Bindman QC recalls how law destroyed the slave trade
On 11 July 2012, two members of a traveller family were jailed for 11 and four years respectively after being found guilty of brutally manipulating and exploiting destitute men for financial gain at a caravan site near Leighton Buzzard. Judge Michael Kay QC at Luton Crown Court said: “In 1834, slavery was abolished in the British Empire. So it is that nearly 200 years after that these defendants have been convicted of holding their fellow human beings in servitude and exacting from them forced labour.”
Unfair trading
Such cases are so rare that they make news. The trade in human beings, mostly African, which existed in the British Empire for several centuries, was ended by law. Its destruction is a corrective to cynicism about the power of the law to do good. After a long campaign in the second half of the 18th and early 19th centuries, led by such men as Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce, slavery was abolished by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. Arguably,
