The reputation of Irish Travellers in Britain, which has – fairly or unfairly – never been good, has been badly damaged by three separate cases involving allegations of slavery

FOUR MEMBERS OF the Connors family will stand trial in Bristol Crown Court in late October to face charges of conspiracy to hold 20 men in slavery or servitude, some of them for years, at a caravan site. However, the four – William (51), his wife, Breda (46), their son John (28), and William and Breda’s son-in-law Miles (22) – are different people from the four Connors arrested amid high publicity in Bedfordshire last Sunday. (A fifth member of the Bedfordshire Connors was charged on Thursday night.)

Unlike the Bedfordshire Connors, who were held after a raid by 200 police, with police helicopter and local TV camera crews in tow, these four were arrested in March at sites in Gloucestershire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire, with little fanfare.

The investigation was prompted, for reasons not yet made clear in court, after the body of Christopher Nicholls, who had been missing since 2005, was found badly decomposed in March 2008 near the Beggars Roost caravan site at Staverton in Gloucestershire.

Following this, a number of sites occupied by members of the extended Connors clan were put under surveillance, leading to raids on March 22nd on Beggars Roost and on two more sites, at Enderby in Leicestershire and Pleasley in Derbyshire. William Connors and his wife were arrested at Beggars Roost; their son John was detained at Pleasley, where seven alleged victims of slavery were found. The couple’s son-in-law Miles was held at Enderby, where eight more alleged victims were discovered.

Prosecuting solicitor Graham Dono told Cheltenham magistrates court the following day that the 20 men found at the three sites were homeless alcoholics, who had been forced to work 14 hours a day laying tarmac or paving stones in Worcestershire and the West Midlands. Sometimes, he claimed, they were paid £20 a day, often nothing. “They were given minimal amounts of food. Movements are restricted, mobile phones are not allowed and victims are kept in fear of reprisals if they attempt to leave,” he told magistrates.

Identity and benefit documents were kept by Breda Connors, in particular, Dono alleged, before going on to tell magistrates that some witnesses who had spoken to the police had claimed that escapees were captured and brought back by the Connors.

‘It is clear from police videos that the slaves have minimal clothing, they are always dirty and dishevelled, they look extremely unhappy and there is evidence of members of the Connors family at the locations in charge of the workers,” he went on. The caravans used to house the men at the three locations were in bad condition, with no running water, minimal heating, haphazard and dangerous cooking facilities, no toilets and no proper washing facilities.

IN A THIRD, separate, case, three more Travellers, John Conners (26), Jerry Conners (19), and Eileen Conners (59), were arrested at a Travellers’ site at Hamble in Hampshire on June 24th and charged with the same offences as those laid in the Bedfordshire case.

Saying it was “shocked and appalled” by the allegations at Greenacres, the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain (ITMB) this week said it was “unequivocal” in its opposition, given “the terrible experiences of slavery and forced labour suffered by Travellers and Gypsies across Europe in the last century”. However, the ITMB’s director, Yvonne MacNamara, is deeply unhappy with Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire police’s handling of Sunday’s raid, particularly the speed of media briefings.

“Why did the police issue briefings to the media which were so quickly refuted by some of the alleged victims? Why were the media apparently so fully briefed in advance of the raid, leading to videos of the raid being published within hours on YouTube?

“Given that the police have been aware and investigating these alleged offences for three years, ITMB can’t help wondering about the timing of this raid and media exposure, days before the internationally condemned evection of Europe’s biggest Traveller site, Dale Farm,” she said.

Tougher slavery-and-servitude legislation was sought by campaigners such as Anti-Slavery International and Liberty after 21 Chinese cockle-pickers drowned in Morecambe Bay, in Lancashire, in 2004 when they were trapped by rapidly incoming tides. The available laws were not good enough, the campaigners argued after Morecambe, because it was often impossible to prove people had been trafficked or to prove the intent of a person to profit from forced labour. Initially, the Labour government opposed the calls, insisting that existing legislation dating back two centuries outlawing slavery was sufficiently strong, but it eventually relented, making the changes in an update to coroners’ laws.

Since the publicity surrounding Sunday’s raid on the Greenacres caravan site, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire police have been pressed to explain the background to their investigation, especially because 28 former residents of Greenacres had spoken to them in the past three years.

The law surrounding slavery in the UK is complex. In 1807, the trade was abolished, following years of effort by William Wilberforce, though it was not until 1834 – a year after his own death – that legislation to free those already enslaved in most of the British Empire was passed.

The status of slave had never existed under English common law, however, so slavery was not specifically illegal until the passage of the Coroners and Justice Act, which provides for 14 years in jail for holding someone in slavery, or servitude, along with seven years for exacting forced labour.

Investigations throughout the UK were hampered, police say, by the old legislation because of the difficulties in proving false imprisonment in cases where someone was brought from a place every day to work elsewhere.

Often, the police have to interpret what is being said to them by alleged victims, who have, in past cases, complained about not being paid properly, rather than having alleged that they have been enslaved.

“They might be a bit agitated or vulnerable. It’s considered a minor case. But to someone who knows about issues of trafficking and slavery, they would know that it’s a sign. It takes a specialist, targeted operation and people with knowledge about this to uncover what’s going on,” says Klara Skrivankova of Anti-Slavery International. However, the gap between the introduction of the legislation and its first deployments are understandable, if frustrating, says Skrivankova’s colleague Paul Donohoe: “It takes time for police, prosecutors and courts to start to use any new legislation.”

The allegations in all three cases are vehemently denied, with Daniel Jameson, one of the solicitors appearing in the Luton magistrates’ court hearing dealing with the Greenacres site this week, alleging that the witnesses now co-operating with the police have substantial police records of their own.

Both sides accept that a large sum of cash, measured “in the tens of thousands”, was found at Greenacres, though the Connors say this money had only recently been returned by police from an earlier raid, and they had not got around to putting it in the bank.

That raid prompted a prosecution on fraud charges, but it ended with his clients “fully acquitted”, said solicitor Andy Smith, who added that they had fully obeyed all bail conditions and had also stopped laying tarmac or paving stones for the duration of the trial.

UNDER SECTION 71 of the Coroners and Justice Act, the prosecution must prove a defendant “knows or ought to know” that the person is being held in slavery or servitude, or required to perform forced labour. Companies or individuals hiring subcontractors allegedly exploiting such people can be made liable, “depending on the circumstances”, for “aiding or abetting the subcontractor’s offence, or for encouraging or assisting the commission of the offence”, according to the Ministry of Justice guidance. “It should be noted, however, that the section 71 offence does not contain the element of trafficking and is not an immigration offence. It is wider and will apply irrespective of whether the victim has been trafficked and irrespective of the immigration status of the victim(s),” it continues.

British courts, it says, have been guided by Articles 1 and 7 of the 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, which notes that servitude involves a particularly serious form of denial of freedom.

“In addition to the obligation to provide services for others, [it involves] . . . the obligation for the ‘serf’ to live on another person’s property and the impossibility of changing his condition,” the guidance, circulated last year, states. Victims must have been coerced, or deceived, threatened with violence, or threatened with exposure to the authorities about immigration or other offences; while the seizure of ID documents would also be a factor.

However, a victim does not have to be left without wages for a prosecution for servitude to succeed, if the prosecution can show that wages were low, subject to unexplained deductions, or paid cash-in-hand. The standard of accommodation offered will also play a role in the court’s decision, particularly if it is overcrowded, unlicensed by the local authority as a place of multiple occupation, or left without certified gas and electricity certificates.

So far, two cases under Section 71 are known to have come before the courts. In August scientist Rebecca Balira, a noted expert on HIV, was convicted of keeping a Tanzanian immigrant, Methodia Mathias, in servitude. She was sentenced to six months in prison and ordered to pay £3,000 in compensation to 21-year-old Mathias, who told the court she had been kept as a slave in Balira’s London flat.