WE’VE heard the Government promise to deport foreign criminals so many times now that it is hard to take seriously the announcement by Justice Secretary Alex Chalk that minor foreign offenders – such as shoplifters, thieves and drug dealers – will be automatically deported rather than imprisoned in Britain.
We know what will happen.
Our human rights establishment has managed to create a perverse incentive for some foreign nationals to commit crimes[/caption]
The criminals in question will hire costly lawyers at UK taxpayers’ expense to argue that being deported would breach their human rights.
That is exactly what happened last year in the case of Ibrahim Ahmadi, an Afghan who was convicted of rape after attacking a sleeping woman in a Glasgow flat.
He was supposed to be deported after being released from jail in 2019, but wasn’t.
After the Taliban retook his home country two years later, his lawyers successfully argued that it wasn’t safe to return him because the Taliban would likely “take a dim view of an individual who had committed a violent sex offence in a Western country”.
Law favours criminals
If only our migration courts would, too.
And yes, you helped pay to keep Ahmadi in Britain. He received £13,562 in legal aid to fight his rape case and a further £1,330 to fight deportation.
It is the same with gangland criminals.
Gjelosh Kolicaj should have been deported to his native Albania after completing a six-year sentence imposed for money laundering.
No one is more fed up with how the soft UK legal system favours criminals over honest citizens than the Albanians themselves
Yet his lawyers argued that it would infringe his right to a family life because his Albanian wife and their two children live in Britain.
Kolicaj had already gained dual citizenship on the grounds that he was previously married to a British woman.
No one is more fed up with how the soft UK legal system favours criminals over honest citizens than the Albanians themselves.
The Albanian head of one charity remarked: “We see the removal of Albanians every day with legitimate business but not criminals who have used their British passports to conduct criminal activities.”
Quite. Our human rights establishment has managed to create a perverse incentive for some foreign nationals to commit crimes — because it increases their chances of being able to stay in the UK.
And it is going to get worse under the latest incarnation of the Government’s scheme to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda for processing.
Under the arrangement, Rwanda will send back to Britain any applicants who commit crimes in that country.
In other words, if you want to settle in Britain rather than Rwanda, go on a shoplifting spree in downtown Kigali.
The government here says it has done a deal with Albania to take back its prisoners, but don’t hold your breath.
A lot of countries are happy to lumber Britain with their criminals and don’t want them back.
David Cameron was so desperate to deport Jamaican criminals that he even promised to fund a new prison in the Caribbean country in return for them taking offenders back to complete their sentences there — but the Jamaican government turned down the offer.
That is why in spite of years of Government efforts we have 10,441 foreign offenders in UK jails — one in eight of the entire prison population.
We did manage to get 37 murderers, child rapists and drug-dealers on a plane ready to take off for Jamaica in 2021.
The human rights industry is taking the mickey
But no — the plane ended up taking off with only four of them on board because the others won last-minute legal reprieves.
The human rights industry is taking the mickey.
The Government is never going to resolve this issue unless it takes a red pen to the Human Rights Act and inserts new clauses which make it absolutely clear that the UK population’s rights to not be murdered, raped or conned by foreign criminals takes precedence over the criminals’ own rights.
If it still proves possible for the European Court of Human Rights to over-rule UK courts on this then we do of course have the option of withdrawing from the ECHR.
Hijacked principles
This would be regrettable as Britain has long been one of the leading promoters of human rights in the world and helped set up the court in the first place.
But its founders would be turning in their graves if they knew how their high principles have since been hijacked by grasping lawyers representing murderers and rapists.
Needless to say, the original convention which underlies the ECHR said nothing about a country being forced to make space for foreign criminals.
Indeed, it was pretty tough on the rule of law — it did not proscribe the death penalty, for example.
A lot of protocols which have been used to keep foreign criminals in Britain have only been added since.
One of the promises of Brexit was that it was supposed to allow us to make our own “points-based” migration system designed to extend a warm welcome to people who will work hard and contribute to our economy while turning back those who will be a burden.
Few would have imagined then that the migrants who seem effectively to have accrued the largest number of points are those who have come here to rob us and murder us.
