New legislation will send a message to human traffickers that Scotland is not a soft touch, a Holyrood committee has heard.
Police Scotland Assistant Chief Constable Malcolm Graham told members of the Justice Committee that the country may have been perceived as such in the past.
He was giving evidence on the Scottish Government’s Human Trafficking and Exploitation Bill, which would create a specific offence of human trafficking for the first time as well as increase the maximum penalty for offenders to life imprisonment.
The Bill would give police the power to confiscate vehicles, ships or aircraft owned or in the possession of people arrested on suspicion of trafficking.
Mr Graham told the committee: “The intent of the legislation is to provide a focus and demonstrate the intent of Scotland as a nation to make our country a difficult place for traffickers to operate in, and indeed there has been some suggestion in the past that some of the legislation and practice we currently have that Scotland could be a soft touch.
“To explicitly state that there could be a life sentence as a maximum penalty is a very clear message about how seriously we take this as a nation and likewise in terms of confiscation of property, I think it’s absolutely essential that we have a range of options by which we’re able to tackle, prevent and disrupt traffickers from operating.”
Under the proposals, prosecutors will be given guidance from the Lord Advocate setting out a presumption against prosecution in cases where trafficked people have been forced into committing crime.
Concerns have been raised that these guidelines may not be sufficient to protect victims and a statutory defence should also be made available.
Siobhan Reardon, programme director at Amnesty International Scotland, told the committee: “These are individuals who have been victims of heinous human rights abuses.
“Their lives are ruined and then to put them into a situation where they are then criminalised or deemed, until they can prove otherwise, guilty of criminal behaviour I think it just adds horrific to horrific injury.
“A statutory defence and a presumption of innocence needs to form very much part of that framework.”
James Wolffe QC, dean of the Faculty of Advocates, added: “The principle of non prosecution is well recognised and the concern is that without a statutory defence prosecution or the protection for victims in this jurisdiction may be less than in the other parts of the UK.
“We’re already in a position where, in terms of the formal structures in place, the victim in Scotland may be less well protected against the possibility that the prosecutor may make a misjudgement.”
But Mr Graham said: “For a number of reasons I think there should be measures put in place to ensure that individuals are not criminalised where they’ve been coerced, but I’m not sure that the statutory defence is the best means of doing that and I think robust instructions from the Lord Advocate to the police would very adequately deal with the circumstances.”
Campaigners have also called for the Bill to be extended to criminalise the purchase of sexual services in Scotland but Ms Reardon said Amnesty did not support that approach.
She said: “These are two very different issues and need to be addressed through adequate and effective legislative and policy frameworks, and we don’t think that we would be doing service to either victims of human trafficking or victims of sexual exploitation and prostitution by conflating them within this one piece of legislation.”