The population of the United Kingdom was increased this week by the arrival of two Albanian lesbians who have been given the right to remain here by an deputy Upper Tribunal judge called Rebecca Chapman. The women insisted that they would face persecution in Albania for their sexual preferences. This is despite the fact that Albania decriminalised homosexuality 30 years ago and in 2010 adopted a law that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Rebecca was not impressed, however, pronouncing Albania to be a ‘patriarchal, conservative society in which homophobic attitudes still exist, particularly in rural areas’. (Those of you who have just read Rebecca’s description of Albania and are consequently interested in emigrating to the country should try the Properstar real estate website. There’s a nice coastal villa going for £832,021, as well as a selection of smaller properties, including one-bedroom flats, from £40,000 upwards.) I suspect that there are some parts of the UK where the people do not differ terribly from the Albanians in their attitudes to sex and gender orientation, but probably not places Rebecca has ever visited. I do not know the name of the two women we have allowed in, but welcome, please, make yourselves at home.
The whole lot of them subvert both the spirit and the intention of the ECHR
We might conclude, then, that it does not matter what liberal laws may be passed by any country, if Rebecca believes them to be ‘patriarchal’ and ‘conservative’ and full of ’phobes. She might as well decide the same thing about Denmark, or the Netherlands.
Anyway, the case of these two devotees of Sapphic love is only the latest in a bizarre series of decisions by the tribunals of late. You may have heard of some of them, such as the Nigerian woman who tried and failed eight times to secure asylum. She was only successful on her ninth appeal after joining a terrorist organisation back home – despite a judge finding she had done so purely ‘to create a claim for asylum’. Or there was the convicted Albanian criminal Klevis Disha (a two-year stretch for possessing money from criminal activities, since you asked), who successfully argued against deportation back to Albania on the grounds that his young son was sensitive and very picky about food and did not like the chicken nuggets they served in the Balkans. Then there’s the Pakistani who served 18 months for grooming young girls and who was allowed to remain because the judge said the man’s family would ‘take a dim view’ of his behaviour and possibly make life difficult for him. Or the wife–beating Pakistani paedophile who was allowed to remain because the courts agreed that he might face ‘degrading’ treatment at home. It is of course beyond the pale that a paedophile might face degrading treatment.
Or how about the convicted Syrian terrorist who was given leave to remain here at least partly because the court heard that he had no plans to do any more terrorising and that his house was ‘always clean, tidy and homely’. Or one of my favourites, the Iran-ian allowed to have his case reheard because he had a lot of Facebook friends. Oh yes.
The tribunal judge in this case was again a lady called Rebecca Chapman – and she overturned the decision of a lower court that the bloke should be booted out post-haste. I have scoured through Google and have yet to find a report of a case where Rebecca thought someone should be kicked out, although there must surely be at least one. I think we have alighted upon the reason why it is seemingly impossible to deport anybody from this country and why there are no foreign countries which meet the pristine standards of the judges.
It is often argued that we should leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), an instrument of the Council of Europe to which we are a party. The convention was adopted almost 75 years ago and its proscriptions no longer have force or relevance in an age of mass migration, we are told. That may well be so – and I have no objection to us renouncing the ECHR and drawing up a new one binding solely on ourselves and which, perhaps, would commit us to respecting human rights while also encoding for ever our status as a patriarchal, conservative and male-dominated society.
It is all quite beside the point. People are apt to blame the ECHR because it is a supranational institution and leaves us at the mercy of foreign judges. But that is hardly the problem we have here, is it? Judge Rebecca Chapman is the problem and she is as British as they come, I believe.
I do not mean just Rebecca Chapman, but the whole lot of them – all the judges who are appointed to adjudicate in the Upper Tribunal (and First-Tier Tribunal, come to that) and who subvert both the spirit and the intention of the ECHR. I do not believe that when the convention was drawn up, its signatories believed that convicted criminals should not be deported because their sons preferred a domestic brand of chicken nuggets.
It is our judges who make those decisions. The ECHR clearly did not intend for it to be taken as read that there are virtually no countries, worldwide, to whom someone might be deported because all of them are in some way, uh, patriarchal or ‘conservative’. And then you look at the other job enjoyed by Rebecca – yes, she is a barrister representing, in the main, asylum-seekers. It seems to me outrageous that those two jobs could be held simultaneously, but there we are.
I would begin by sacking whoever appoints the judges and then work through the list of them, sacking each one in turn. It is they who make us a laughing stock (to ourselves). They have taken liberties with what was once a noble convention. Get rid of them.
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