The UK’s asylum system is a dangerous joke

The Conservative Party won a huge parliamentary majority back in 2019, after promising to ‘take back control’ of Britain’s laws and borders from the EU. Yet today, post-Brexit Britain’s borders are anything but secure. Two cases, which emerged in the past week or so, highlight just how dysfunctional Britain’s approach to immigration, citizenship and asylum has become.

At the weekend, the Mail on Sunday revealed that an ISIS propagandist, who arrived in Britain illegally, was able to acquire UK citizenship and gain the legal right to remain here on human-rights grounds. The man, known only as ‘S3’ for legal reasons, is of Sudanese origin. He entered the UK illegally 18 years ago and was granted asylum on the grounds that he might be tortured in his homeland. Yet after he gained British citizenship, he regularly returned to Sudan without any issues. In 2016, British security services discovered that he had actively disseminated pro-ISIS propaganda across social media.

Two years later, S3 was stripped of his UK citizenship by the Home Office while he was abroad. But he soon managed to enter the UK illegally for a second time. According to MI5, he remains a serious security risk. Nevertheless, his lawyers successfully argued in court that depriving him of his UK citizenship and deporting him would breach Articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – the right to life and the right to be protected from torture. Last month, judges granted S3 the right to remain in the UK indefinitely and the right to lifelong anonymity.

It is dumbfounding that an ISIS fanboy can be offered this degree of protection by the courts. His frequent trips to and from Sudan alone make a mockery of his claim that he fears being tortured. Worse still, the granting of anonymity means that his own neighbours will be completely unaware of the fact that they live next door to a man who has given succour to a barbaric death cult. When our migration system prioritises the whims of Islamist extremists over the needs of the law-abiding majority, then something has gone badly wrong.

In a similarly shocking case, immigration judges ruled last week that a crime lord from Albania, who holds both British and Albanian citizenship, must also have the right to remain in the UK on human-rights grounds.

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