Dozens of Jamaican criminals whose deportation was blocked by judges at the last minute included a knife killer and a rapist, prompting anger from government figures tired of the “farce” of judicial review.
There was something of a controversy surrounding the charter flight, which originally involved up to fifty serious criminals, because the migrants involved came to Britain in their youth — although the general public seemed markedly less concerned about it than left-liberal politicians and members of the establishment media.
In the end, only 17 criminals were successfully deported, after the Court of Appeal decided that a three-day mobile phone mast outage meant that another 25 did not have adequate access to legal advice on their cases.
The 25 rescued criminals, who may now have to be released on bail while the Government seeks to rectify the situation, included Fitzroy Daley, who stabbed a man to death outside a pub in London, and Fabian Henry, who “raped a teenage girl in Bristol and groomed and abducted another”, according to The Times.
The Government is said to be deeply unhappy with the judges’ eleventh-hour interference in the deportations, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s much-maligned chief adviser Dominic Cummings remarking that “urgent action on the farce that judicial review has become” is required.
Johnson’s administration has indicated that it intends to curb judges’ relatively new powers to interfere with political decisions, having already lost a great deal of patience with the Tony Blair created Supreme Court of the United Kingdom for its repeated interventions on Brexit.
On February 13th Johnson appointed Suella Braverman as the Government’s new Attorney-General in a government reshuffle, who wrote an article in late January warning that Brexit would involve “taking back control” not just from unelected foreign officials but from unelected judges as well.
The judiciary, she suggested, has “stretched beyond recognition” the concept of “human rights” in order to increase their own power — and that this would have to change.
But even for the handful of criminals who were successfully deported to Jamaica, media giants like the publicly-funded BBC appear to be going into overdrive to present them as victims of an injustice.
The corporation’s flagship Newsnight programme flew out correspondent James Clayton to the Caribbean country to interview some of the deportees — although not any more obviously unsympathetic ones, convicted for crimes like killer Daley and rapist Henry — and plastered their social media feeds with videos of them claiming to feel British, to miss their families, and to be facing hardship.
One such clip shows one Rupert Smith complaining that he feels “numb”, “hurt”, and “wounded” by his experience. It does not go into details about the crime(s) he was convicted for, although reports elsewhere indicate he launched a brutal attack on someone with a metal wrench.
Similarly, a Rayan Crawford is presented as a “registered disabled” man deported to Jamaica “after being convicted for burglary”.
However, in a report on its website the BBC admits Crawford was in fact “convicted 10 times for a total of 22 offences, including the burglary.”
The BBC is not known to have interviewed any of the 17 deportees’ surviving victims.
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