Gus Carter Gus Carter

Leaving the ECHR won’t fix Britain’s immigration chaos

[John Broadley] 
issue 02 November 2024

If you tuned into the Tory party leadership race, you will have heard rather a lot about the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Robert Jenrick wants Britain to leave because it stops us deporting foreign criminals. Kemi Badenoch argues that leaving won’t fix our immigration woes. She’s not wrong.

Of the 144,200 people who have arrived on small boats since the start of the crisis in 2018, just 3,788 have been returned. That’s despite the fact that, according to the left-leaning charity the Refugee Council, some 40 per cent of people who come to the UK this way are not refugees. If you apply that rather liberal calculation to the total number, 57,200 should have been made to leave. And yet here they still are. So the problem arises before we even get to the ECHR: in our sclerotic immigration system.

I saw a small part of that system in operation recently at a first-tier immigration tribunal in north London. There, I witnessed the case of an Albanian man who had arrived in the UK as a teenager in the 1990s. He had lied about his age, claiming to be younger than he was, and about coming from war-torn Kosovo. ‘He gave a false account of his nationality and his date of birth,’ his representative admitted. The man has now fathered four children, three of them in the UK, and is on Universal Credit. He’s also schizophrenic.

There’s little risk in trying your luck if the Home Office won’t bother making you leave if you fail

‘The appellant’s subjective fear of removal is relevant… he is likely to be at risk of an increase in psychotic hallucinations,’ his lawyer explained. ‘The children are British, it is likely that the appellant’s poor mental health will have an impact on his children.’ Under Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, which incorporates the ECHR in British law, the man has a right to a family life. Never mind the fact that he lied his way into the country more than 20 years ago and it has taken the system this long to get around to trying to remove him. In that time, he has indeed built a life.

The number of people granted asylum or leave to remain hit a four-decade high this year. Nearly two-thirds of asylum claims are accepted – but even people who fail, and who exhaust all other legal options, often end up staying anyway. Analysis of the latest Home Office statistics reveals that just 10 per cent of those who had their claims rejected left the country – down from 62 per cent in 2013. The vast majority of those who went did so voluntarily, many with a grant of £3,000 from the taxpayer. The only failed asylum seeker to be sent to Rwanda agreed to go in return for a cheque from the Home Office.

According to Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, part of the reason for the dramatic drop in deportations is the Windrush scandal. Government and civil servants became wary of removing people after it was found that the Home Office had deported those born as British subjects. Some ministries stopped sharing data with the Immigration Enforcement department, which also had its funding cut.

The result is that claimants often spend years inside the system – and, perhaps because there are so few deportations, the number of applications has doubled over the past decade. There’s little risk in trying your luck if the Home Office won’t bother making you leave if you fail. At the end of last year, there were 215,500 cases being processed and 111,000 individuals receiving asylum-seeker support, which includes housing and up to £200 a month. The latest figures show that the government is spending £8 million a day on hotel bookings to house migrants.

Back at the tribunal, a supposed Eritrean spy was giving evidence in an airless room. Sitting behind him was his wife, wearing an electric-blue Juicy Couture tracksuit. According to his lawyer, the man was imprisoned in Ethiopia and beaten by the military because they thought he was working for the Eritreans. He was appealing the Home Office’s attempts to deport him on the grounds that his life would be at risk if he were sent back to either of the two countries.

‘If you were returned to Ethiopia, what do you fear?’ his lawyer asked sympathetically. The man spoke and then an interpreter in a raincoat gave us his words in English: ‘I’m not entitled to live in Ethiopia. In fact, they detained me for two years and they deported me.’

And what about Eritrea? ‘The Eritrean government is a very heavy government. There’s no freedom if I go back there and there’s conscription – they take you to the army by force.’

Since he’s been in Britain, the man has joined the anti-government Eritrean People’s Democratic Front. He is, he said, just an ‘ordinary member… You only try your best. You meet, you contribute money’.

Such claims of unfair imprisonment are all but impossible for the Home Office to assess. There aren’t the resources to investigate allegations about events which took place years ago and thousands of miles away. That said, claimants are often wise to the way the Home Office has to operate. Take the man’s membership of the Eritrean People’s Democratic Front. A cynic might conclude that it’s a wheeze: leave your country, do something in the UK that will anger your government at home, and then apply for asylum here.

Claims of oppression are a surefire way to have your asylum claim accepted. There are now more claimants from Turkey than from Syria, Bangladesh or Sudan. Around 60 per cent of Turks are accepted – which might sound odd to the 3.8 million Britons who go on holiday to the country each year. Many of those asylum seekers will say they have been victims of political persecution and some will have every right to do so. But one suspects the reason that the number of Turkish asylum applicants has quadrupled in the past two years may have more to do with the country’s economic woes, including inflation at nearly 100 per cent, than it does with any political crackdown.

Britain seems remarkably generous when it comes to helping those who have overstayed their welcome

Britain seems remarkably generous when it comes to helping those who have overstayed their welcome, even when they present a serious risk to people already here. Last year, a Gambian man who raped a woman at knifepoint was allowed to remain in the UK. He had arrived on a visitor visa in 2007 and spent the next 15 years dealing drugs in Edinburgh. Despite laws that state foreign nationals convicted in our courts should be deported, he successfully argued he should be allowed to stay on human rights grounds. A tribunal found that, if returned to his home country, he would ‘experience genuine difficulties being able to access a regular supply of his necessary medications’. He would also face a ‘real risk of social -isolation and stigmatisation’ given that he’s a rapist.

An absurd use of human rights legislation, no doubt, but why was the man allowed to deal drugs in Scotland’s capital for more than a decade before that? Yes, the ECHR and its human rights rules protect dangerous criminals, but a functioning immigration system would have removed him before he could make such preposterous claims.

The sclerotic system is what allowed Abdul Ezedi, the Clapham alkali attacker, to stay in the UK after he was convicted of sexual assault. He lost two asylum claims, but his third was accepted when a priest told the tribunal that Ezedi was a committed Christian and so he faced persecution in Afghanistan. Ezedi went on to attack a woman and her children and then commit suicide, after which he was given an Islamic burial. Friends spoke of him as ‘a good Muslim’.

‘I’m just praying no one asks us to define a working woman.’

While human rights legislation is a problem, then, the real issue is the system. Tribunals are clogged with pointless bureaucracy and the Home Office seems unwilling or un-able to remove those with no right to be here.

In a corner room under a royal crest, a judge on a tatty chair became increasingly flustered as I watched. The Home Office had failed to serve a 900-page bundle of documents on the convicted criminal they were trying to deport. ‘There must be somewhere we can buy a USB stick around here,’ said the appellant’s barrister. But no, putting the document on a memory stick would be a breach of His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service data protection rules. So, after an hour of attempting to convert the document from PDF to Word, the case was adjourned. The judge ordered that the Home Office print out the documents and post them to the criminal’s solicitors, who were, in turn, ordered to scan all 900 pages and email them to his barrister. Another hearing was scheduled for two weeks’ time to make sure that they had been posted.

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