by Jenni Russell, The Times
Rights of UK citizens are lost when cases mount of foreign criminals using ‘family life’ to appeal against deportation
A n immigration tribunal has just ruled that a jailed Congolese drug dealer may remain in Britain because he has a sick son who would benefit from having his father here. The dealer, Mr X, was given three years for Class A drug dealing in 2023. As with every foreign prisoner sentenced to longer than 12 months, he was an automatic candidate for deportation.
Sending such foreign criminals home has been law in Britain since 2007, and the Home Office says it is a “longstanding national priority”. Only those who successfully argue that they qualify for legal exceptions may stay. Yet a string of successful appeals have left the impression that the balance between offenders’ rights and those of UK citizens has gone awry.
Mr X’s lawyers used the Human Rights Act (HRA), which enshrines Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to family and private life, to argue that their client should stay. They said he had a “strong and stable” relationship with his children, one of whom, a haemophiliac, requires weekly injections.
[…] Mr X is the most recent of many cases. In February a judge agreed that a Pakistani paedophile who had spent four years trying to entrap pre-pubescent girls into sex should not be deported as that would be “unduly harsh” on his daughters, aged three and four — even though the father had been banned by the criminal courts from living with his daughters at the time. The court had found he was “in denial” about his offences with “very little prospect” of rehabilitation. The Home Office appealed against the deportation refusal. The case is still being fought.
Such defences are common. An illegal Albanian migrant, jailed for running a large cannabis farm, is now a legal resident because his preschool daughter needs a “male role model”. Senior judges agreed his rights to family life outweighed the public interest in deporting him.