The National Audit Office’s finding that the number of foreign-national offenders in prison or deported has remained broadly unchanged is likely to add to the rightwing clamour for the Human Rights Act to be revoked.
Even though the deportation of foreign nationals blocked under European legislation forms a small proportion of those highlighted by the NAO, they have commanded a vast amount of media coverage.
One of the most notorious cases was that of Learco Chindamo, who was 15 when he stabbed headteacher Philip Lawrence to death outside his London school in 1995. In 2007, Chindamo, an Italian national, won an appeal against his proposed deportation at the conclusion of his sentence, on the basis that he was from an EU country and had already lived in the UK for 10 years by 1995. Ministers blamed the Human Rights Act but the decision was mainly based on immigration rules, brought in to comply with an EU directive, which say that a national of an EU state who has resided in the UK for 10 years cannot be deported except on “imperative grounds of public security”.
In another case, last year judges ruled that Jason Efred Raje Francis, who took part in the gang rape of a 14-year-old girl in a children’s playground, could not be deported to Jamaica because he had fathered two children in Britain, after Francis’s lawyers argued that it would breach his “right to private and family life” under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The same article was successfully relied on by lawyers acting for Earl Daren Rodney, who was jailed for ransacking a hairdresser’s during the 2011 London riots. He got 20 months for burglary and acquiring criminal property, before also winning an appeal against deportation, as he too had fathered two children in Britain.
In February last year, the Mail reported that out of 201 cases of foreign nationals convicted in relation to the London riots and passed to the UK Border Agency, only 15 had been deported despite Theresa May’s call for them all to be thrown out of the UK.
Another case was that of Derrick Kinsasi, jailed in October 2011 for 18 months for burglary and theft from a branch of Comet, the electricals store, during the second day of the riots. Judges ruled that sending him back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo would breach his right to family life. Ubong-Luke Nkanta, a Nigerian from Thamesmead, south-east London, was also jailed for 18 months for burglary during the riots but also succeeded in arguing that his right to family life gave him a right to remain in the UK.
In February 2011, Jumaa Kater Saleh, from Sudan, who was convicted after being part of a group of five men who lured underage girls to a house for sex, was allowed to remain in the UK after a first-tier immigration tribunal concluded there was overwhelming evidence that he was a member of the Zaghawa tribe from Darfur, where his family were said to be subjected to intolerable treatment by the majority population of the area. He won the right to damages last year because he was held in custody too long following unsuccessful attempts to deport him.
