đź“· Photo: Judiciary of Seychelles via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
VICTORIA, Seychelles —
The Seychelles Court of Appeal has overturned the human trafficking conviction of Nizam Uddin Ahmed, a 73-year-old Bangladeshi national who had been living in Seychelles since 2014. The appellate court delivered its ruling on December 15, 2025, allowing the appeal in its entirety and acquitting Mr Ahmed of every offence with which he had originally been charged.
The judgment, handed down in the final 2025 sitting of the Court of Appeal at the Palais de Justice in Ile du Port, marks the conclusion of a case that had drawn sustained public attention since Mr Ahmed’s 2024 trial. According to the revised cause list for the December 2025 session published by the Seychelles Judiciary, the appeal was listed for hearing under case references SCA CR 05/2025 and SCA CR 06/2025, both arising in Supreme Court matter CR 53/2018. A summary of the session published shortly after confirms that the Court of Appeal delivered judgments in 14 appeals during the December 2025 sitting, with three overturned and eleven confirmed, including the criminal appeal Mr Ahmed had filed against his 2024 conviction.
In a written ruling read in court, the panel held that “the appeal against the Supreme Court judgment is allowed, the convictions on all counts are quashed, the sentences on all counts are set aside, and the appellant is acquitted of the offences charged.” The order is unequivocal. It quashes every count on which Mr Ahmed had been convicted, sets aside every sentence, and clears him of the charges in their entirety.
The case has its origins in late 2024. On November 28, 2024, the Supreme Court of Seychelles convicted Mr Ahmed on six counts of trafficking in persons following a trial in which he had pleaded not guilty. The case involved allegations that he had exploited six Bangladeshi nationals in a labour context during his years as an investor in Seychelles. Sentencing took place on April 17, 2025, but the court declined to impose an immediate custodial sentence, citing Mr Ahmed’s age and documented medical conditions.
The appellate ruling serves as a reminder that convictions in Seychelles, as elsewhere, are subject to independent review and that an acquittal at the appellate level can follow where the higher court finds that the original proceedings could not stand. The Court of Appeal’s written reasoning supports the conclusion reached on December 15, 2025, and the order becomes a full vindication for the appellant, whose legal team had argued throughout that the convictions could not be sustained on the evidence.
Seychelles has, in parallel, maintained a strong international standing on the broader question of human trafficking. According to the 2025 U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons Report, Seychelles remains on Tier 1, a designation reserved for governments that fully meet the minimum standards set out in the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Reporting on the country narrative confirms that the government has continued to demonstrate serious and sustained efforts against trafficking, the only African country to have achieved the Tier 1 ranking in recent reporting cycles.
The Mr Ahmed appeal is the only one of the three overturned judgments from the December 2025 session for which detailed reasoning has been made public through this newspaper’s reporting. The Court of Appeal typically issues its full written judgments within weeks of the oral ruling, and the formal record of the Ahmed appeal, identified in court listings as [2025] SCCA 33, is expected to be filed in the same manner as previous decisions of the appellate court.
The Seychelles Court of Appeal sits periodically during the year, usually in March, July, and December, to hear civil, criminal, and constitutional appeals from the Supreme Court. Its December sitting is the last of the judicial year and traditionally deals with the heaviest case load, including any appeals whose records have become complete in the months preceding.
Sources cited: Seychelles Judiciary, revised cause list for the December 2025 Court of Appeal session (PDF). Wikipedia, Trafficking in Persons Report (overview of the U.S. State Department’s annual ranking). Seychelles Independent, “2025 Trafficking in Persons Report: Seychelles,” 10 October 2025.
Source: SN
