Pro-migrant “activist” lawyers successfully launched a last-minute legal challenge to block the deportation of over 20 Channel migrants.
On Tuesday, 23 illegal migrants were pulled off of a Home Office charter deportation flight to Poland on human rights grounds, with attorneys claiming for the first time that the migrants were victims of “modern slavery” and therefore should not be deported.
The Home Office was successful, however, in deporting nineteen criminals to Poland, including four rapists, thieves, and violent criminals convicted of grievous bodily harm, according to the Daily Mail.
At the time of this reporting, the ethnicities of the foreign national offenders have not been made public.
The chairman of the London-based think tank, Migration Watch UK, Alp Mehmet said in response to the failed deportations: “Last-minute legal challenges have long been a problem with regard to immigration removals.”
A Home Office spokesman said: “Once again, we received a number of late legal claims from migrants who had arrived on small boats who were also meant to be removed on this flight, meaning we were unable to proceed with their removal. These claims are often without merit but are given full legal consideration.”
“We are determined to reform our broken asylum system which currently allows those who come to the UK through illegally facilitated routes from safe countries to undermine and slow down our efforts to protect those fleeing oppression, persecution and tyranny through existing legal routes,” the spokesman added.
The Home Office said that it plans to “introduce a new system that is firm and fair”.
Home Secretary Priti Patel has long complained about “activist lawyers” blocking deportations of foreign criminals and has consistently claimed that once the Brexit transition period ends and Britain is free from the European Union control, the Home Office will be enabled to ramp up deportations.
It is unclear if this claim is true, however, as the UK will still be bound by a series of European regulations post-Brexit, as it will still remain in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) because it is technically separate from the European Union.
The UK will also be subject to international maritime laws, while unbinding, have been successfully used as a justification for the government’s failures to turn around migrant boats in the English Channel back to France.
Though there is merit to the idea that pro-migrant lawyers are abusing the system, whether for financial or activist purposes, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government, with its 80-seat majority, has the ability to change migration laws at any time.
High Court judges have even called on the government to change the law, saying: “It is high time the Government dealt with what amounts to abuse of the law.”
Last Wednesday, a legal campaign successfully blocked the deportation of 23 Jamaican criminals, including a murderer.
The campaign was supported by former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as well as a group of British celebrities including supermodel Naomi Campbell.
In a statement, the Home Office said: “It is foreign national offenders that the Labour Party want to put first. Killers. Rapists. Drug dealers. Convicted foreign criminals who have no right to be in this country, free to walk our streets.”
“This Conservative Government will not let this happen and will never put these criminals first,” the spokesman claimed.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here: @KurtZindulka
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