Europe forces UK to pay £13k to Iranian child sex attacker we failed to kick out

EUROPEAN judges have told Britain to pay thousands of pounds in damages to an Iranian paedophile whose human rights were breached because he refused to be deported.

The Government was told to hand taxpayers’ money to the convicted sex attacker for unlawfully holding him in immigration detention for too long.

The European Court of Human Rights said that the illegal immigrant was wrongly caged for more than a year – while the Home Office tried in vain to throw him out of the country.

Judges in Strasbourg accepted there was a risk that the criminal, who can only be called JN, would re-offend or abscond if set free.

But they said the Home Office had showed a ‘woeful lack of energy and impetus’ in trying to remove him, which meant he had been detained illegally.

He had argued this violated Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which safeguards liberty.

Yesterday he was awarded £13,400 in damages, costs and expenses. Five years ago, he was handed £6,150 compensation in the High Court.

The 44-year-old has run rings around the Home Office by thwarting repeated attempts to boot him out of Britain for 11 years. He currently lives in Barking, East London, and is refusing to cooperate with the authorities.

In a further slap in the face to the public, the criminal has claimed a six-figure sum in legal aid to fund his battle to stay in the country.

The Iranian was last night accused of making a mockery of the immigration system.

Tory MP Philip Davies, a leading Eurosceptic, said: ‘This is another ludicrous decision by a court that is losing more respect by the day.

‘If this man did not want to be detained before being deported, he should not have carried out the sex attacks in the first place and he should have gone home under his own steam.’

The case will also add weight to Theresa May’s demand that Britain should quit the European Court of Human Rights. The Home Secretary is a long- standing critic and said this month in a major speech that if the UK wanted to boot out more terrorists and foreign criminals, it must quit the Strasbourg court altogether.

JN unsuccessfully claimed asylum when he arrived in Britain in 2003 and was given 12 months in prison and a deportation order after being convicted of indecently assaulting two 15-year-old girls the following year.

He spent two periods totalling four years and seven months in immigration detention pending his deportation between 2005 and 2009. JN has insisted he wants to return to Iran.

But despite the Home Office trying to deport the sex attacker at least eight times, they have failed because the Iranian authorities refuse to take him unless he signs a disclaimer consenting to his return.

The illegal immigrant was released on bail in December 2009 when he took legal action against his ongoing detention.

The High Court in London awarded him £6,150 compensation after ruling he had been detained illegally for three months from September 2009.

JN then complained to the ECHR that he had been detained for too long, breaching his human rights.

Euro judges accepted that the ‘risk of his further offending and the fear that he would abscond were all factors which had to weigh in the balance in deciding whether or not his continued detention was reasonably required for the purpose of effecting his deportation’.

But they said that the Home Office then adopted ‘a sterile tactic’ of ‘merely sitting and waiting while repeatedly urging [him] to change his mind in the full expectation that he would not’.

The judges criticised the ‘woeful lack of energy and impetus’ in trying to secure his deportation.

They concluded that his detention from mid-2008 to September 2009 was a breach of his human rights because immigration officials failed to pursue his deportation with ‘due diligence’.

But in a key victory for Britain, the EHCR confirmed it was not compelled to set down maximum time limits for immigration detention or provide for automatic judicial review of such cases.

The UK does not specify how long people can be kept in immigration detention before deportation, with Home Office guidance saying it should not extend beyond a ‘ reasonable period’.

A Home Office spokesman said: ‘We maintain that our immigration detention system is firm but fair and are pleased that the court ruled the system had not breached the Convention.

‘We are carefully reviewing the court’s findings and will consider our next steps. It would be inappropriate to comment further while legal proceedings are ongoing.’

‘Woeful lack of energy’