One foreign criminal is escapingdeportation nearly every day by using human rights laws, shocking figures reveal.
UK Border Agency statistics showed 350 offenders, including a double murderer, were allowed to stay in the UK last year on human rights grounds instead of being sent home.
In many cases, dangerous offenders were granted the right to stay despite the courts accepting that they pose a risk to the public.
Among those to have taken advantage of the Human Rights Act to stay here are killers, rapists, serial burglars and drug dealers. Critics said the figures should prompt a further examination of how human rights laws are being used.
Tory MP James Clappison said: ‘Deportation of foreign criminals was a sorry saga under the last Government.
'This shows there are still issues to be resolved and we need to look very carefully at the way in which human rights legislation is being implemented in the UK – not least because this seems to be allowing foreign criminals to remain in this country.’
In Opposition the Tories promised to scrap the Human Rights Act and replace it with a British Bill of Rights, but the pledge was abandoned by the coalition Government.
Each individual case can cost taxpayersthousands in court costs and legal aid as criminals try everything to avoid returning to their homelands.
The foreign prisoners scandal erupted in 2005 when it emerged that more than 1,000 foreign inmates had been released without anyone even considering whether they could be kicked out of Britain.
In 2007, shortly after becoming Prime Minister, Gordon Brown told foreign nationals to ‘play by the rules’ or face the consequences. He added: ‘If you commit a crime you will be deported from our country.’
Foreign criminals who are jailed for more than a year are automatically considered for deportation. But often the Home Office is powerless to act in the face of court and tribunal rulings.
In most cases, lawyers argue that deportation would breach their clients’ right to a private and family life because they have children, a family or relatives in the UK.
Others say they cannot be deported because they would be at risk of imprisonment, persecution or torture in their home countries.
Although individual cases of criminals using human rights laws to escape being sent home have come to light before, this is the first time the shocking scale of the problem has become public.
Previous estimates had put the total number at around 50 per year. And despite publishing the figure of 350, Border Agency officials admitted they still did not know the exact number, because uncovering it would require an examination-of individual files.
A spokesman-for the agency said 5,535 foreign national prisoners were deported last year. He added: ‘A review of our data shows that, in the same year, approximately 350 individuals were successful in preventing their removal from the UK based on their rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.
The UKBA will always appeal against such decisions where appropriate.’
Among those offenders who won the right to stay in Britain are Laith Alani, a paranoid schizophrenic who stabbed two doctors to death.
The Iraqi murdered consultants Michael Masser and Kenneth Paton in 1990, stabbing them both repeatedly in an unprovoked attack.
The tribunal judge ruled that if Alani was sent back to Iraq he would be unlikely to receive the treatment he gets on the NHS for his illness. Sending him home would also breach his right to a family life because he moved to the UK with his parents as a child, the judgment said.
Another case was that of Rohail Spall, a Pakistani businessman jailed after he was seen spiking a woman’s drink so he could rape her. Police found hundreds of date rape drugs in his car.
He was allowed to stay because sending him home would breach his right to a family life. A third offender is Mark Cadle from Belize, who came to the UK aged 18 and was jailed for sex with a 14-year-old girl who he infected with a sexually transmitted disease.
He has a string of other convictions, including racially aggravated assault, and a court heard he was a ‘significant danger to the public’ and likely to reoffend. But the immigration tribunal ruled it would breach his human rights to separate him from his family.
The 42-year-old has five children from five mothers, and his mother and halfsibilings live in Britain. Last year the Home Office was prevented from deporting a Congolese crack addict whom a court described as a ‘burglar on an industrial scale’.
He was given a five-year jail term for beating a woman unconscious and sexually assaulting her but was allowed to remain in Britain because of his right to a family life.
The court ruled he was a ‘home-grown criminal’ because he came to the UK aged five.
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