Why was an Afghan flasher granted asylum?

Every time I think that I can no longer be surprised by the failures of the UK’s immigration and asylum system, another jaw-dropping scandal emerges.

On Wednesday, Sky News revealed that a convicted sex offender and asylum seeker had avoided deportation to his home country of Afghanistan on rather shocking grounds. In essence, he couldn’t be deported because he’s a sex offender.

It sounds almost too ridiculous to be true. At some as-yet-undisclosed point in the very recent past, the 31-year-old man, referred to only as DH, was given a 12-month jail sentence at a central London magistrates’ court. He had been found guilty of deliberately and repeatedly exposing himself in public. His conviction and incarceration was viewed by the authorities as potential grounds for his deportation.

But at his subsequent immigration tribunal, his legal team appealed his asylum claim on the grounds that his ‘sexually disinhibited behaviour’ – which has reportedly continued despite his conviction – would make him vulnerable to ‘serious harm’ in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Denying him refuge in the UK would therefore breach his human rights, his lawyers argued. The tribunal judge agreed and promptly awarded DH refugee status.

This is a particularly egregious example of a practice that has become all too common in recent years – namely, the exploitation of the UK’s human-rights framework by dangerous asylum seekers and other foreign nationals. We’ve seen this happen in the case of Abdul Ezedi, the Clapham alkali attacker and convicted sex offender who ‘converted’ to Christianity in order to claim asylum here – as a Christian, he claimed he risked religious persecution in Afghanistan. We’ve seen it happen in the case of Albanian crime lord Gjelosh Kolicaj, who dodged deportation on the grounds that it would violate his ‘right to a family life’. And now we’re seeing it again in the case of DH, a convicted and seemingly persistent sex offender.

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