When the convicted child rapist told an immigration court he should not be deported because he had fathered 15 children in Britain, even the seasoned judge looked aghast.
‘One. Five?’ she spluttered as she brought herself upright in her chair on a Wednesday morning this month: ‘You have fifteen children in the United Kingdom?’ The disturbing revelation echoed through the dreary courtroom which, with its plastic chairs and tables and uniform white walls, seemed more like a sterile call centre than a traditional house of law.
The 48-year-old Jamaican appeared before us via a large plasma television screen, beamed into Taylor House Tribunal Centre in Angel, north London, from a category B prison in Swaleside Prison in Kent.
The child rapist’s case is just one of 15 or so I came across during a fortnight spent in two of Britain’s immigration courts last month – Taylor House and Field House, Central London – where I listened to tribunals, researched records of past decisions and spoke to court staff.
He had been jailed for 16 years after being found guilty at Birmingham Crown Court in 2016 of four counts of rape and six of sexual assault of two girls, abuse which started when they were seven and lasted for several years.
One of the girls had bravely told a teacher what was happening, explaining that her attacker had warned them to ‘keep it our secret’.
After the police opened an investigation, the girls’ abuser fled and it took detectives three years to finally track him down and arrest him. Yet despite the shocking nature of his crimes, the rapist cannot be named or identified in his fight against deportation because of a court order imposed on the Press by a judge.
Why was this order issued? To protect his right and that of his family to a private life, under Article Eight of the European Convention on Human Rights Act. Whether he will win his right to remain in Britain remains to be seen – the decision will be made later this year.
Not all of the tribunals at these courts concern convicted criminals, of course.
I heard cases of students who had overstayed after their visa had expired; there was one involving a mother who was said by the Home Office to be here illegally but who argued she should not be deported because her children would have to grow up in her absence.
Another case involved an Albanian woman who had reportedly been trafficked from her homeland and sold into sexual exploitation by gangsters. The Home Office agreed that she was a victim of trafficking but was still intent on deporting her, claiming that she was here illegally. She will have to wait months before her case can be heard in full.
Still more involved cases of two Palestinian women seeking asylum following the war between Israel and Hamas. In a bureaucratic error the Home Office forgot to respond to legal submissions from their lawyer, delaying the case by months.
My impression was of a system in crisis, overwhelmed by numbers – in June 2024 there were a staggering 220,000 ongoing asylum claims in Britain. And inevitably, for all the comparatively humdrum cases I saw and some seemingly worthy applicants for asylum, there were shocking examples of people I thought were trying to game the system by exploiting the European Convention on Human Rights.
It was at Field House that the well-reported and farcical decision was made to allow Albanian criminal Klevis Disha, 39, who was jailed in 2021 for two years for handling £300,000 of stolen cash, to stay in Britain because his 10-year-old son does not like Albanian chicken nuggets. The tribunal ruled that it would be ‘unduly harsh’ to send the boy back with his father due to his food sensitivities.
But during my fortnight investigating the courts, I came across another unreported decision taken at Field House that seemed just as unfathomable.
It involved a Cameroonian fraudster who was jailed for almost four years and deported in 2008 before he re-entered the country illegally in 2017. According to online records of his case, the Home Office attempted to remove him a second time in 2023, but sensationally he claimed that he was a purveyor of sex toys – and that as such, he would be perceived as a homosexual in Cameroon and persecuted. His lawyers, citing the European Convention on Human Rights, argued that if Britain did deport this fraudster, his Article Two and Three rights would be breached.
These ‘articles’ are laws used by barristers to prevent the deportation of criminals, in this case by arguing the Cameroonian’s protection under the ‘right to life’ and ‘freedom from torture’ would be violated. Though the court accepted he was indeed heterosexual and had fathered children here, they nonetheless agreed that he ran the risk of being considered gay if he were returned to his home country.
So they allowed him to stay in Britain, according to legal documents obtained by the Mail.
In theory, any foreigner jailed for 12 months or more should be deported after serving their sentence. But in practice, the various clauses of the Human Rights Act are deployed to allow many to stay – if a judge is persuaded the rights of the criminal and their family outweigh the danger posed to the British people.
With such an emphasis on human rights, the legal process is unwieldy and desperately time-consuming.
Many asylum applicants will appear multiple times before tribunals over several years arguing for their right to remain. This puts a huge strain on the immigration courts, which are simply not large or numerous enough to handle the number of cases.
In the initial instance after their application to stay in Britain is refused by the Home Office, they have the right to appeal at a so-called First-tier Centre, such as at Taylor House, of which there are 11 in Britain.
The larger ones have up to to 20 courtrooms, the smaller venues five. In these centres, lawyers from the Home Office being paid up to £60,000 a year put the case for deportation before specialised immigration judges on between £150,000 to £160,000 a year.
Meanwhile, barristers represent the asylum seekers seeking leave to remain.
The entire process is funded by taxpayers, part of the eye-watering £5 billion-plus spent annually by the Home Office on asylum. And yet the great majority of what happens in these courts is kept from public scrutiny.
Not only are huge numbers of cases heard with anonymity orders in place, but the judges’ decisions in First-tier Centres – mostly made long after the hearing – are not published.
Indeed, the only way the public can hear of the outcome is if either the Home Office or barristers acting for the asylum seeker choose to appeal the decision to a higher tribunal. In which case the hearings take place at the country’s one Appeals Tribunal at Field House. Here judges do publish the decisions and can, if they see fit, overturn anonymity orders.
In one recent example I uncovered at Field House, the Home Office lost an appeal to deport a Chechen fighter wanted in Russia on suspicion of aiding and abetting the murder of a government official. Known as AZ, the 54-year-old claimed to have fled his homeland after fighting in two wars against Russia and being implicated in the murder.
Russia’s main security service, the FSB, chased AZ as he slipped across the Russian border – and continued to track him from Belgium to Holland. While in the Netherlands, he was jailed for 18 months for firearm offences and robbery. But on his release, he said he became aware he was being tailed once again by Putin’s security forces and fled.
How he came to Britain, whether through people smugglers in the back of a lorry or on a small boat, remains a mystery.
One of the challenges immigration judges face is ascertaining whether dangerous men such as AZ are being honest in their accounts, and whether sending him back to Russia really could mean torture and death.
In the event, the judge decided that AZ’s evidence was ‘found to lack credibility’.
But he concluded it would be wrong to deport him, on the grounds that he would be persecuted in Russia for being a former Chechen militant. Many might conclude the judge was too lenient. Perhaps so – but such decisions are being made day in day out at Field House.
In a second case in Field House last week, for example, a Pakistani former corporal and radar technician told the court he fled his homeland after he was asked to become a double agent by the Taliban. In 2010 on annual leave with his family in Swabi in the north-west of the country, he claimed he was approached by insurgents.
Having reported the encounter with his superior officers back at barracks, he said he was arrested by the military police and beaten up on suspicion of being a spy.
Though he had joined the Airforce as a 16-year-old and amassed 13 years of service, he deserted and arrived in Britain on a student visa in 2013.
His visa expired, meaning he is now an ‘overstayer’ locked in a bitter battle with the Home Office and fighting for his right to stay in Britain. If he is sent back, he would face trial and potential execution in breach of his Article Three rights as an alleged Taliban spy, according to his lawyer. The decision will be published in two weeks’ time.
I am no expert, but of the six cases I’ve highlighted here after my fortnight in the courts, it seemed to me there might be grounds to allow the applicants to remain in three of them; the Albanian woman who had been trafficked into the sex trade; the former Pakistani radar technician accused of being a Taliban spy; and the Chechen gunman trying to avoid going back to Russia. However, everything depends on whether they are telling the truth.
The arguments to remain seemed self-evidently absurd in the other two: the Jamaican child rapist with 15 children; and the Cameroonian fraudster with his sex toys.
Given the astonishing number of cases heard, it left me with the view it is not just a well-publicised handful but thousands of people who are making a mockery of the immigration tribunal system.
A still more troubling aspect is the veil of secrecy drawn over Britain’s immigration courts by judges who ban the Press from naming criminals.
Last year, a record 108,138 people claimed asylum in the UK, 18 per cent more than in 2023. Of course many will not be criminals, but there are more than 10,000 foreign nationals in prison in England and Wales, and figures from last year showed there were nearly 9,000 foreign criminals at liberty here, with almost half having been here for over five years.
A life of crime now appears to be no barrier to a foreigner determined to stay in our country.