Judge Blocks Deportation of Migrant Double Rapist Because of Poor Healthcare in Somalia

Britain's Home Secretary Priti Patel attends a COVID-19 pandemic virtual press conference
LEON NEAL/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

A British has blocked efforts by Priti Patel’s Home Office to deport a double rapist from Somalia on grounds that he would not receive proper mental healthcare in his native country.

The 49-year-old migrant claimed asylum in Britain after arriving in the country in 2004, however, the Home Office sought to deport the man after he was convicted of eight criminal offences over the course of six years, including the rape of two women.

The Somali national was sentenced to a meagre seven years in prison for rape at knifepoint before being put in immigration detention.

According to the Daily Mail, an immigration tribunal judgment heard: “While at HMP Stafford he was not able always to behave appropriately. On several occasions after January 2017 he was placed in segregation, his attitude and behaviour being aggressive and unacceptable.”

The migrant was also deemed to pose a “high risk of serious harm” to the British public — yet the British judiciary blocked the Home Office twice from deporting him citing mental health issues which they argued would not be adequately addressed in Somalia.

In the first hearing an immigration judge blocked his deportation, saying that mental healthcare in Somalia was “extremely poor” and adding that “those with mental health issues, particularly those who are aggressive, were often stigmatised, considered ‘possessed’, and subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment within both society and families, including stoning and chaining.”

The Home Office appealed the decision, but Judge Judith Gleeson rejected the appeal, saying: “The making of the previous decision involved the making of no error on a point of law.”

The Conservative-led Home Office, for its part, appears to have given no indication that it intends to press for changes to the laws which allow such decisions in Parliament, where Conservative leader Boris Johnson won a majority of 80 in 2019.

British judges have often blocked the deportation of foreign national offenders and illegal aliens over the past years.

Last February, for example, a judge blocked the deportation of mostly Jamaican criminals, including a rapist and a killer because they briefly lacked access to mobile phones while they were detained.

A judge in Scotland also halted the deportation of a Taliban fighter in June on the grounds that he suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) while fighting for the Islamist terror group in Afganistan and would not receive the care he supposedly required in his home country.

In another stunning example of judicial activism, the Court of Appeal decided that it would “not be fair” to deport a Zimbabwean paedophile because the government’s lawyers supposedly took to long to present the correct justification for his removal.

More recently, a group of alleged “activist lawyers” successfully convinced judges to remove 23 illegal migrants from a Home Office charter deportation flight in December.

The Conservative government has long promised to step up deportations and to change laws to prevent judicial activists from thwarting their efforts. However, under the leadership of tough-talking Home Secretary Priti Patel, deportations actually fell by over 4,000 in 2020, representing a 79 per cent decline over the previous year.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.