𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

The state of Britain’s human rights architecture is so pathetic that it borders on parody. And just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, cases like Shah Rahman remind us that they can. Rahman is a Bangladeshi national who, in 2012, was one of four Al-Qaeda-inspired extremists convicted over a plot to bomb the London Stock Exchange, with a handwritten hitlist which included Boris Johnson and the US Embassy in London. Now, a newly released immigration judgement has revealed that after his release, Rahman was formally denied asylum under the Refugee Convention – because he is literally a convicted terrorist – but then allowed to stay in Britain anyway on human rights grounds.

You couldn’t make it up. Apparently, his deportation to Bangladesh would breach Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides absolute protection from torture or inhuman and degrading treatment. So in effect, the man who wanted to blow up the City cannot be deported because somebody, somewhere, might not welcome him politely.

Unfortunately, Rahman is only the tip of a large iceberg. Take the case of Klevis Disha, for example, a 40-year-old Albanian man who entered the UK illegally as a teenager and was later convicted of possessing £300,000 in proceeds of crime.

When the Home Office tried to strip him of his deception-obtained citizenship and send him home, an immigration tribunal ruled it would be “unduly harsh” on his young son, because the boy “would not eat the type of chicken nuggets that are available abroad”.

Then there is the Pakistani man known only as MH, caught trying to lure what he thought were “barely pubescent girls” into sexual acts online, and rightly jailed.

A judge later blocked his deportation on the extraordinary basis that his family in Pakistan took a “dim view” of paedophiles, which would cause him “significant difficulties” on return. The tribunal also factored in his wife’s plea that she felt partly responsible, having been too ill for marital relations during her Covid hospitalisation.

In another delightful example, a Pakistani sex offender who attacked a teenage girl avoided removal because he is an alcoholic, and drinking is culturally forbidden in Pakistan.

It doesn’t stop there, though. Nigerian Olutobi Ogunbawo, convicted of paternity fraud against the immigration system, initially avoided deportation because his wife claimed IVF was unavailable in Nigeria – a lie that a single Google search by the Upper Tribunal eventually exposed.

Meanwhile, Emmanuel Jack, a romance fraudster who swindled six women out of £186,000, has been allowed to stay because his British wife and children rely on NHS care supposedly unavailable in Nigeria, reasoning that effectively turns every dependent child of a foreign offender into a residency permit.

And then there are the classics. An unnamed Nigerian fraudster, jailed for five and a half years, announced hours before his deportation that he was bisexual and would face persecution in Lagos, whereupon an immigration judge duly granted him asylum.

A Jamaican rapist – who had protested in court that he didn’t understand raping a sleeping woman counted as rape – blocked his removal by producing one brief relationship with a man in 2015 and arguing that Jamaica’s hostility to bisexuals would endanger him.

If anybody still wonders why migrants bother pretending to be gay in court, a recent BBC undercover investigation has offered the answer: reporters posing as migrants found advisers at firms including Connaught Law and Law and Justice Solicitors willing to charge Pakistani and Bangladeshi clients up to £7,000 a head to manufacture fake gay-asylum claims, complete with staged Pride-event photographs and rehearsed interview scripts.

At one community meeting of 175 would-be LGBT asylum seekers in Worcester, attendees openly admitted barely any of them were actually gay. Nevertheless, in 2023, nearly two-thirds of claims made on grounds of sexual orientation were waved through at first attempt.

Welcome to modern Britain, where apparently everyone else’s human rights seem to matter except those of the people actually forced to live next door to criminals.

Yvette Cooper’s new migration White Paper, with all its promises to tip the balance towards removal, will run straight into the same tribunals and industry that produced this circus. Keir Starmer, for as long as he’s still around, insists that he can toughen deportations while remaining wedded to the current ECHR regime. But he clearly can’t.

Sooner or later, Britain will have to decide whether the safety of its own people matters more than the tender feelings of judges who rank a child’s fussy eating above a rape victim’s suffering. Until we do, the joke remains on us.