Boris Johnson’s government is claiming that upcoming legislation will stop lawyers from blocking deportations by resorting to “meritless” judicial reviews of immigration tribunal decisions.
A spokesman for the government, which has talked tough on immigration and foreign criminals but presided over a 79 per cent fall in deportations of foreign criminals in 2020, said new laws “will end the industrial use of judicial review to the High Court with hopeless claims that have already been adjudicated by tribunal judges which frustrate removals at the last minute.”
Of 5,500 judicial reviews since 2012, a mere 12 — 0.2 per cent of cases — were actually successful, with the “vast majority” of referrals being immigration and asylum cases, according to The Telegraph.
“It is clear from the panel’s findings the courts have got things wrong,” commented a government source, referring to the 2012 ruling by the Tony Blair-created Supreme Court which allowed immigration tribunal cases to be referred to senior judges.
“The judicial review process is vital to protect the rights of individuals, but it is equally important that it is not open to abuse, used to conduct politics by other means, or to create needless delays,” the source added.
“What we have seen here is a reversal of a decision taken by elected politicians that has led to significant delays and people with no right to remain in the country avoiding removal. That is simply not right.”
Promises by the Conservatives to fix Britain’s “broken” asylum and immigration rules have come to nothing before, however, as have a number of laws over the years which the public were told would result in automatic custodial sentences for burglars and knife criminals, which all came with enough caveats included for judges to essentially ignore them.
For years now, for example, successive Conservative party Home Secretaries — responsible, broadly speaking, for law and order and national security — have pledged to bring the constantly worsening Channel migrant crisis under control, with incumbent minister Priti Patel having promised that she would put an end to the illegal crossings once Britain was finally free of EU rules with the expiration of the 2020 Brexit “transition”.
No such conclusion to the crisis has in fact been realised, however, with Breitbart London reporting in early March that the Home Office had failed to carry out a single illegal boat migrant deportation since the beginning of 2021.
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