AFTER a string of defeats in immigration cases in the Scottish courts, the Home Office has had a judgement in its favour in the Court of Session in Edinburgh.

In a judgement issued at the weekend, Lord Armstrong threw out an appeal by a Chinese citizen, Dunshou He, against a decision by former home secretary Amber Rudd that he was not a victim of human trafficking.

Dunshou He claimed to the Home Office that he had fled China in order to escape the authorities whom he feared would persecute him because they suspected him of having breached the state’s one child policy.

He had approached a person (named in court as Aming) who undertook to assist his escape to Europe on the basis that, once there, he would work for Aming in order to pay off his travel costs of about £36,000.

Once in Ireland, he claimed to have been under the control and direction of Aming, and to have been forced to work in a number of Chinese restaurants.

The court was told when first interviewed by an immigration officer on November 15 last year, Dunshou advised that he had a wife and a 20- year-old son in China, and that his parents also lived there.

Dismissing the appeal, Lord Armstrong noted that the Home Office had stated: “Subsequently, on January 18 2018, he advised British Transport Police that his wife had left him and no longer lived in China and that he had three children remaining who were looked after by his father, as his mother had died while he had been in the UK.

“On November 15 2017 he had indicated that he had travelled to the UK by a flight from China to Paris, and then, by another, from Paris to London. On January 18 2018, he advised, rather, that he had travelled from China to Hong Kong by car, had climbed mountains and, from an airport there, had flown to France, and then onward to Ireland in a container on a boat.”

Lord Armstrong said the Home Office was entitled to make its decision on the basis of those accounts.