Minister Slams Deportation Lawyers for Taking UK ‘for a Ride’

Protesters carry a placard at a demonstration to highlight conditions inside Brook House i
JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images
Victoria Friedman

Justice Secretary Robert Buckland has criticised pro-migrant activist lawyers for filing last-minute ‘human rights’ based appeals to delay deportations for criminal migrants.

The Lord Chancellor, who heads the ministry of justice, said that he and Home Secretary Priti Patel were working on ways to “streamline” the immigration system including restricting the use of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) which enables criminal migrants to claim they are at risk of “torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” in order to avoid deportation.

Condemning the manner in which activist lawyers acting on behalf of criminal non-citizens were making a mockery of British justice and of Britons, Mr Buckland told the Daily Mail that the removals process had become “very, very lengthy and, frankly, sometimes deliberately elongated in order to buy people more time in the country”.

“What I don’t think people like is being taken for a ride by people who keep on inventing new grounds of appeal,” he added.

Mr Buckland was alluding to the “activist lawyers” that Ms Patel’s Home Office had outright condemned for blocking the deportation of illegal aliens who crossed the English Channel from France — often travelling through several safe countries beforehand before landing in Britain — claiming to need asylum in the UK.

In August 2020, Whitehall sources told media that in one planned deportation of migrants who had entered the UK illegally via channel dinghies, the department was set upon by caseworkers from three separate law firms who set to work to delay returning migrants to Spain, a safe country they had passed through on their way to the UK, with the returns being agreed with the Spanish government.

A high profile tussle between activist lawyers and the government included last year’s efforts to deport 23 criminal migrants back to Jamaica. Celebrities and Labour MPs who condemned deporting the foreign criminals attempted to compare the removals to the Windrush Scandal, despite the flight including rapists, sex offenders, and murderers.

Initially, all 23 had been removed from one flight on varying grounds of appeal, including Jermaine Stewart who was jailed in 2014 for six years for raping a woman who fell asleep on his couch at his home in Liverpool.

Some were removed on the allegations that they had, in fact, been victims of human slavery.

Buckland specifically raised this abuse of laws meant to protect genuine victims of human trafficking and slavery, telling the Mail: “The modern slavery laws are such an important, ground-breaking piece of legislation. It breaks my heart to think it might be potentially open to abuse by people just because they want to launch another argument to buy them more time.”

Thirteen of the 23 were eventually deported in early December including three drug dealers, a man who illegally possessed a firearm, two convicted for sexual activity with a girl under 16, one man convicted of manslaughter, and three murderers.

It is not just activist lawyers who are thwarting British justice in the name of compassion.

On Sunday, Breitbart London reported on how a judge had blocked the removal of a double rapist, who posed a “high risk of serious harm” to the public, on grounds he would not be able to access adequate mental health care in his native Somalia.

The immigration tribunal judge, Judge Judith Gleeson, expressed concern that the 49-year-old sexual predator would face stigmatisation for his mental health issues because of the cultural attitudes in his home country, and be in danger of being considered “‘possessed’”, subjected to “inhuman and degrading treatment”, and risking “stoning and chaining”.

The Sun reported on Sunday that a convicted Islamist terrorist is on the verge of winning his refugee claim in the UK after a 27-year-long battle, because he faces the death penalty for part in a plot to assassinate the Egyptian prime minister.

Yasser Al-Sirri was also charged in the U.S. in connection to the World Trade Center bombing, claimed that Osama Bin Laden died an “honourable death”, and defended Taliban propaganda videos which showed American military vehicles being bombed.

The 58-year-old member of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad first claimed asylum in the UK in 1994 after being found guilty by an Egyptian court in absentia for the failed assassination plot. A car bomb had detonated outside of a girls’ school, and while failing in its primary goal to kill the prime minister, resulted in the death of a 12-year-old girl.

His eight attempts to appeal his asylum rejections have cost an estimated £2 million in British taxpayers’ money.

Last week, the Appeal Court ruled in Al-Sirri’s favour, with the Home Office now said to be considering its next steps in removing the foreign terrorist.

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