Justice Lydia Mugambe during the colloquium to consider the Supreme Court’s ruling on the 2016 presidential election petition in Kampala. PHOTO | MICHAEL KAKUMIRIZI
Presiding judge David Foxton: Lydia Mugambe, you may remain seated until I ask you to stand. On March 13, 2025, after a trial, you were convicted of four offences: Count 1: Conspiracy to do an act to facilitate the breach of UK immigration law by a non-UK national, contrary to s.1(1) of the Criminal Law Act 1977.
Count 2: Arranging or facilitating the travel of the complainant with a view to exploitation, contrary to s.2(1) of the Modern Slavery Act 2015. Count 3: Requiring the complainant to perform forced or compulsory labour, contrary to s.1(1)(b) of the Modern Slavery Act 2015. Count 4: Conspiracy to intimidate a witness, contrary to s.1(1) of the Criminal Law Act 1977. It now falls to me to sentence you for these offences. The victim in this case is entitled to lifelong anonymity under section 1 of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1992. That prevents publication of the victim’s name or material which might identify the victim in any way, across all platforms and all mediums.
This is a very sad case. You are now 50 years old and of previous good character. You have held office as a High Court Judge in Uganda since 2013 and as a Judge of the United Nations International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals since May 2023. Those appointments followed a successful legal career, which you worked very hard to achieve.
In the course of your practice as a lawyer and your time as a judge, you have made a material contribution to the protection of human rights, particularly through your decision in the Mulago National Referral Hospital case, a contribution which was recognised when you received the Vera Chirwa human rights award in 2019. You have won other awards to which I was referred. In 2020, you won a scholarship to further your interest in human rights law by undertaking a D Phil at Oxford University. You arrived in the UK to continue your studies in person in May 2021, and in September 2021, you were joined by your three children.
That welcome reuniting of your family brought with it the challenge of reconciling the demands of parenting and running a home alongside your commitments as a postgraduate student, and as a judge of the United Nations, in which role you were expected to undertake a number of overseas workshops. However sympathetic one might be to the difficulties of managing these competing demands on your time, it is impossible to condone or excuse the criminal means by which you set about securing help. You had met the victim in Uganda when she was 19 years old and experiencing considerable hardship.
You provided the victim with employment and accommodation as a nanny and maid in Uganda, as well as supporting her in her studies. You decided to bring the victim to the United Kingdom to act as the children’s live-in nanny and your maid, while you were completing your course. As you explained to a friend in a message of 14 July 2022 shortly before the victim’s arrival, “I don’t have to teach her. She knows us well”.
You had no legal right as the holder of a Tier 4 student visa to sponsor anyone to come and work for you in the UK. You initially planned to bring the victim to the UK on a tourist visa. However, a fateful encounter with the Deputy High Commissioner of the Republic of Uganda, John Leonard Mugerwa, at a reception held by the High Commission for Ugandan students studying in the UK on 20 March 2022, led you to embark on a serious breach of the UK immigration laws, through the use of a thoroughly dishonest scheme. In short, you agreed with Mr Mugerwa that he would sponsor the victim’s visa under a special immigration scheme for personal servants of accredited diplomats, on the basis that the victim would take up a job as Mr Mugerwa’s housekeeper and live with him. However, there was no such job. The intention all along was that, once she arrived in the UK, the victim would live in your house and work for you as your nanny and maid, and you would pay the necessary fees for the visa.
To assist in this dishonest scheme, you and Mr Mugerwa worked together to produce a false contract of employment between the High Commission and the victim, giving particulars of a job which did not exist, and intending that this document and a similarly false Certificate of Sponsorship from Mr Mugerwa for the non-existent job would be used to obtain a visa for the victim.
You arranged for the victim to sign those documents and carefully managed the application process. Those false documents were, as you intended, filed in support of the victim’s visa application, and a visa under the special immigration scheme was in due course issued on the basis of those documents. What was in it for Mr Mugerwa?. I am sure on the basis of the evidence heard by the jury that, in return for him providing a means for your nanny and maid to enter the UK unlawfully, you agreed to help him out in a court case in which he was a defendant in Uganda, by speaking to the judge about the case.
You made a number of attempts to do so. To her credit, the judge whom you tried to contact refused to take your calls. Your attempt in evidence to suggest that you were acting entirely appropriately in these attempted contacts, under an “open door” policy by which litigants were encouraged to make direct contact with judges about the status of their cases in Uganda, is belied by your suggestion in a message to Mr Mugerwa that the reason the judge you had tried to contact had not returned your calls was because the judge “fears talking on the phone”.
Not only did you engage in a dishonest conspiracy with Mr Mugerwa to obtain a UK visa for the victim on a false basis, but you also brought the victim to the UK intending to force her to work for you, under the threat of a penalty if the victim did not do what you wanted. You did not intend to pay the victim for her work for you in the UK, as you had in Uganda, and you did not do so.
Instead, the victim was required to undertake a wide range of household tasks, including cooking, cleaning, and childcare responsibilities, in return for her food and board, and the opportunity to take paid employment outside the home, which you initially helped her secure. Over time, you increasingly limited the victim’s opportunities to work outside your home because this interfered with the unpaid work you wanted her to do for you, and the victim felt that she had no alternative but to comply with your demands.
When you allowed the victim to work outside the home, it was only on terms which suited you – for example, when you and your youngest son went back to Uganda, or, at a late stage in the offending, in a job with anti-social hours after the children were in bed.
From the time when you were first approached by the police about the victim on 10 February 2023, and at all material times thereafter including in your evidence in this court, you have given a thoroughly dishonest account of how the victim came to the UK and the circumstances in which she came to be living and working in your house. While that does not aggravate your offence, your complete lack of remorse and inability to take responsibility for your actions necessarily has some impact on the personal mitigation advanced on your behalf.
As you became increasingly desperate about your forthcoming trial, you organised a number of attempts to contact the victim through your niece, through the victim’s pastor and through her family, for the purpose of intimidating her so she would not give evidence against you. This was a clear breach of your bail conditions and something which you must have appreciated involved a serious interference with the administration of justice.
The victim has provided a wide-ranging personal statement. She gives evidence as to the impact which reporting these offences to the police and giving evidence against you have had on her life. She describes herself as living in fear and isolation in this country, being concerned about the effect of her giving evidence against you on her family back in Uganda and on herself.
Attention in Uganda The case has attracted considerable comment in Uganda, some of it critical of the victim, which has been a source of distress to her. This has occasioned her considerable anxiety, for which she has received treatment. The victim refers to reports of unwanted attempts to contact her family members, and she expresses the fear that what she describes as powerful people in Uganda might take action against her if she ever returned to Uganda. She states that, for that reason, she feels unable to safely ever return to Uganda to see her family. In addition, her inability to give the address of the safe house where she is staying is making it difficult for her to obtain employment.
It is essential, however, that I keep in mind the specific offences I am sentencing you for, and the evidence adduced before this court in relation to those offences. To the extent that the victim’s statement refers to other alleged events, those matters have not been tested in this court, and I place no reliance upon them. However, there can be no doubt that the victim’s concerns are genuinely felt, and that the sense of fear and isolation she feels is an entirely predictable consequence of these offences, including the efforts you made to cause her not to give evidence. Against that background, I now turn to the specific offences.
Justice Lydia Mugambe
I intend to begin by considering the sentences which I would impose by reference to the features of the particular offences and the applicable sentencing guideline, reflecting considerations of totality along the way. I will consider the effect of more general issues of mitigation at the end of these remarks. I am going to take Counts 2 and 3 first and treat them as the “lead offences” for sentencing purposes.
I will refer to the Sentencing Council Guideline for these offences, which came into force on 1 October 2021, as the MSA Guideline. While all three types of offending covered by the MSA Guideline – slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour –are serious, I accept that the offence of forced or compulsory labour at issue here is the least serious of the three forms: The MSA Guideline first requires me to determine your level of culpability.
While you played the leading role in bringing the victim to the UK for the purpose of exploiting her here, this was not a case in which the relevant offending involved some form of criminal hierarchy, but one in which you essentially acted alone. As the MSA Guideline notes, “where the level of the offender’s role is affected by the very small scale of the operation, the court should balance these characteristics to reach a fair assessment of the offender’s culpability”. None of the other “Category A” high culpability factors are present.
I accept that you were intending to secure an advantage for yourself in the form of an unpaid nanny and housekeeper, for whom you provided board and lodging. I am not persuaded, however, that the gain you were seeking to secure can be described as “substantial” in the context of the MSA Guideline. However, none of the indicators of lower culpability are present.
This was clearly an offence involving significant planning and pre-meditation, and you were the moving spirit behind the offending. Accordingly, this is a case of medium culpability for MSA Guideline purposes, which falls within Category So far as harm is concerned, the victim was not exposed to physical harm, but was undoubtedly caused psychological harm in being forced to work for you without pay, and in the position of vulnerability and isolation which being brought to the UK on that basis entailed.
This type of offending is always serious (R v Martin Rooney [2019] EWCA Crim 681, [70]), and involved exploiting the vulnerability of someone you brought to the UK, and who you knew to be wholly dependent on you. I also accept that there was financial loss or disadvantage to the victim, who was forced to work long hours without remuneration beyond the food and board she received.
However, when the victim did work outside the house, there was no attempt on your part to take any part of her wages or charge her for food and board, and there were periods of time when your youngest child was away when the victim was free to work as she wished. In these circumstances, I am not persuaded that the financial harm to the victim can be characterised as “significant”. It is accepted that one Category 2 harm factor is present here: “substantial and long-term adverse impact on the victim’s daily life after the offending has ceased”.
This arises from the victim’s ongoing fear that she is not able safely to return to Uganda, including to visit her family, her continuing anxiety for her own safety and that of her family, and the ongoing difficulties she is experiencing in obtaining work. These were not the immediate consequence of the modern slavery offences themselves, but of the reports the victim made to the police and her evidence at trial. However, they form a natural and wholly predictable consequence of your offending.
In these circumstances, there is one Category 2 factor present, but with the distinct feature I have identified, one Category 3 factor in the form of some psychological harm and one Category 4 factor in the form of financial harm falling short of significant financial harm. Taking everything into account, I am satisfied that Category 3 harm best reflects the particular features of this case.
On that basis, the MSA Guideline indicates a starting point for a sentence of imprisonment of 6 years’ custody, and a range of 5 to 8 years’ custody. So far as aggravating factors are concerned, the offending took place over some eight months, albeit (as I have mentioned) the degree of exploitation varied during that period. I accept that there was some control of the victim’s passport and identity documents, and at least one identity document was taken by you, but one again this was not continuous, with the victim having control of her own documents while the family was away, and being able to ask for them when required for an identified purpose.
Heated conversation The evidence does not establish that the heated conversation which took place on the day the victim left your house involved an attempt to prevent her reporting the offending to the authorities, and I am not therefore persuaded that this aggravating factor is made out in this case.
Nor am I persuaded that there is a further aggravating factor in the form of an abuse of trust?. On the basis of the victim’s evidence, she had largely lost touch with your family when the issue of her coming to work for you in the UK first arose, and the victim’s personal statement denied that she had the status of a family member. Nor does the modern slavery offending involve conduct in your capacity as a judicial officeholder. Further, it is clear that the victim enjoyed some measure of autonomy, particularly when your youngest child was staying elsewhere, and generally in relation to the use of the phone you provided, and having her own set of house keys.
It is also necessary to have regard to the rather unique circumstances of this particular case, which involved a single victim who had previously worked for you in Uganda, trafficked by you to do similar work in the UK. The victim knew you and your family well, and at least for some purposes, was treated in the same way as your children.
Having regard to all of those factors, I am satisfied that it is not necessary to raise the sentence for Count 2, which I will treat as the lead offence, above the 6-year starting point. I will impose a concurrent sentence of three years on Count 3. There are no offence-specific mitigating factors which justify reducing the sentence below that starting point. I will address general mitigating factors once I have considered all four offences.
The final sentencing part runs in tomorrow’s edition
