Lydia Mugambe, a UN criminal tribunal judge and Oxford University law PHD student, has today (Thursday, March 13) been found guilty of using her judicial status to facilitate the travel of a young Ugandan girl to Oxford to be her unpaid housemaid.

The 49-year-old had produced a fake employment contact for the girl’s work visa stating she would be a domestic servant for John Leonard Mugerwa, who at the time the Ugandan high commissioner.

However, the girl was never paid for her childcare work for the defendant and struggled to ‘hold down steady employment’ due to Mugambe ‘withholding her ID documents’.

After just over two days, a jury found her guilty of one count of each conspiring to do an act to facilitate the commission of a breach of UK immigration law by a non-UK national, arranging or facilitating travel of another person with a view to exploitation, requiring a person to perform forced or compulsory labour, and conspiracy to intimidate a witness.

Opening the case last month, prosecutor Caroline Haughey KC told the jury that Mugambe had taken advantage over the girl – who cannot be named for legal reasons – in the most ‘egregious way’.

She said: “The ability to come and go as we please, be properly paid, indeed actually paid for the work we do, to be treated as with equality and with something approaching dignity is what society expects and demands.

Through the trial, the jury heard the victim had felt ‘isolated’ and that her working hours were ‘limited’.

Jurors heard that she ‘lost all hope’ and ‘felt very stuck’.

In the interview, the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told police: “I was so stuck and I felt so lonely… at home she [Mugambe] was changing every day, she was a different person.”

She will now be sentenced at the same court at a later date by The Honourable Mr Justice Foxton, who presided over the case.

Oxford Mail