Institute for Migrant Rights
Railway line at Cianjur station, c. 1890 · KITLV, CC BY 4.0

Migration Jurisprudence from the South › United Kingdom

Hounga v. Allen

Supreme Court of the United Kingdom · United Kingdom · 2014-07-30 · National court

Citation: [2014] UKSC 47
Type of case: Private
Outcome: Decided for the migrant side

Question

Does working illegally bar a trafficked domestic worker from claiming discrimination in her dismissal?

What the court decided

No. Public policy against trafficking and in favour of protecting its victims outweighs the illegality defence.

In plain language

A young woman from Nigeria was brought to the UK on false papers to work in a family home, abused and then thrown out. The employer said she could not sue because her work was illegal. The Supreme Court said she could.

Dalam bahasa sederhana

Seorang perempuan muda dari Nigeria dibawa ke Inggris dengan dokumen palsu untuk bekerja di rumah keluarga, dianiaya lalu diusir. Majikan berkata ia tidak bisa menggugat karena pekerjaannya ilegal. Mahkamah Agung menyatakan ia boleh menggugat.

Pertanyaan: Apakah bekerja secara ilegal menghalangi pekerja rumah tangga korban perdagangan orang untuk menggugat diskriminasi atas pemecatannya?

What happened afterwards

  • 2014-07-30: Tribunal award for discriminatory dismissal restored.

Sources

Open this decision in the interactive collection (compare, filter, Indonesian view, downloads).

Cite as: Institute for Migrant Rights (2026), Migration Jurisprudence from the South, version 0.1, https://theimr.org/court-decisions/d/hounga-2014/. This page summarizes a court decision for research and advocacy; it is not legal advice.

For researchers

This collection of decisions is built for empirical legal scholarship and socio-legal research on migration and the rights of migrant workers, as well as for advocacy.

The coded variables support statistical analysis in law: cross-national comparison, regression and event-history designs, and law and economics questions such as how recruitment fees, wage protection and limits on changing employer affect migrant workers. The data can be downloaded for replication.

Keywords: case law; jurisprudence; judicial decisions; comparative constitutional law; courts and migration; judicial behavior; litigation outcomes; refugee law; non-refoulement; citizenship and nationality; empirical legal studies; empirical legal scholarship; quantitative legal research; statistical analysis in law; law and economics; law and economics of migration; comparative law; socio-legal studies; legal pluralism; migration law; labor migration; migrant workers’ rights; human rights law; access to justice; Global South; Asia; Africa; Middle East; Latin America; Indonesia; open data; replication data.