Leisure Clothing directors in jail for human trafficking claim fundamental rights breach

The Chinese directors of the now-shuttered Leisure Clothing textiles factory, currently in jail for human trafficking, are claiming to have suffered a breach of human rights.

The two Chinese nationals, former managing director Han Bin and ex-marketing director Jia Liu filed constitutional proceedings last month, challenging their conviction.

Han and Jia were both handed six-year jail terms in January after being convicted on appeal of trafficking and exploiting Vietnamese and Chinese employees at the Bulebel-based factory. They were found guilty of forcing employees to work long days with few to no breaks, in illegal working conditions.

In an application filed on 1 March before the First Hall of the Civil Court in its constitutional jurisdiction, Han, Jia and the company claim that in their particular circumstances, where their acquittal had been overturned on appeal, the court failed to hear evidence or witnesses or send the acts back to the Court of Magistrates to be heard and evaluated there. They claimed this amounted to a violation to their right to a fair hearing.

Lawyers Jose Herrera, Pio Valletta, Jason Azzopardi and Therese Comodini Cachia signed the application.

“Taking into account the circumstances of the case, the nature of the evidence and testimony and the context in which the testimony and the proceedings themselves started out as a case about employment law and ended up as proceedings about criminal offences, one cannot fail to conclude that the case ought not to have… been determined without direct assessment of the testimony given by certain witnesses,” they said in their application.

One of the primary reasons for which the acquittal had been overturned, they said, was the Court of Criminal Appeal’s understanding of a particular witness “when that testimony manifestly established the opposite.”

The witness, who they claim, said that his company would not receive payment from the defendants, but from an agency called Vihatico, had been misunderstood by the court as establishing that “once a prospective worker signed the contracts, Leisure Company Limited received the sum of 600 American Dollars from Vihatico as payment.”

In the case of Liu, who had been acquitted of all charges by the Court of Magistrates, the fact that he had been convicted on the basis of testimony contradicting the finding of the court of first instance, had also led to him being deprived of the opportunity to have that testimony assessed a second time by the Court of Criminal Appeal.

The application also states that Leisure Clothing Ltd itself had suffered a breach of its fair hearing rights as it had not been a party to the proceedings and neither had it been proven that the defendants had also been charged as a judicial representative of the company. “As a consequence, a judgment could never have been handed down against the company and it is emphasised that it was not able to defend itself [from the charges].”

The constitutional application asks the court to declare a breach of the right to a fair hearing, declare that Leisure Clothing Ltd had been punished and its assets confiscated without it being a party to the criminal proceedings and therefore unable to defend itself.

The court was also asked to declare null the judgments of the Court of Magistrates and the Court of Criminal Appeal, as well as to declare that if it disagreed with the first court’s evaluation of the facts, the Court of Criminal Appeal should have sent the acts of the case back to the Court of Magistrates to evaluate them anew.

A second application filed before the First Hall of the Civil Court’s Asset Recovery Section, asked the court to declare that the assets seized from Bin Han and Jia Liu were not profits or income from offences under the Dangerous Drugs Act, nor property acquired or obtained using such profits or income and therefore revoke the Court of Criminal Appeal’s order for their confiscation.

This application was also filed by the same lawyers.

The Leisure Clothing saga

The company had been a major textile manufacturer, sewing garments for high-end labels such as Emporio Armani and Karen Millen. Owned by Chinese firm CICET, it had ceased to operate in 2017 after the arrest of the two directors.

The human trafficking abuses had come to light in October 2014 after several of the now-closed Bulebel factory’s Vietnamese employees were arrested while attempting to leave the island using false Italian identity documents.

The workers had told the police that they had not been paid the agreed wages and that their passports had been withheld by the company. A police investigation followed.

A string of Vietnamese employees had then testified about how they would only be paid €200-€300 monthly – half the amount they had been promised, and well below the minimum wage – for working 12 hours a day, seven days a week and had their passports confiscated by the company upon their arrival.