TWISTED JUSTICE (cont)

A day after Mail reveals terrorist got £250k legal aid, judges rule it would be ‘unfair’ to deport Zimbabwean sex offender

A REFUGEE convicted of a serious sex offence against a 13-yearold girl cannot be deported because it would be unfair on him, judges have ruled.

They said Wilfred Mosira can stay in Britain despite his crime – even though there is no threat to his safety or freedom in his native Zimbabwe.

Three Court of Appeal judges accused Home Office lawyers of confusion over Mr Mosira’s status and not putting forward proper arguments for his deportation until too late. Lord Justice Sales said it was ‘not fair to Mr Mosira’ for the Government’s lawyers to wait until ‘the eleventh hour’ to raise arguments that could have seen him thrown out of the country.

It comes after the Mail revealed yesterday that a convicted Al Qaeda terrorist has been given £250,000 in legal aid to fight deportation to Jordan.

One reason that Mosira, 31, can remain in Britain is that lawyers representing Theresa May – home secretary when the case began – had argued he should be sent home because he would not face real persecution in Zimbabwe.

The judges said the grounds on which Mosira had been granted refugee status were not that he was in any danger in Zimbabwe, and so the Home Office had been making the wrong case. In fact, the ruling found, Mosira came to Britain under a short-lived scheme operated by Tony Blair’s government that allowed children of refugees to be given the same status.

Mosira’s mother had been recognised as a refugee in 2001 because she wanted treatment on the NHS. Lord Justice Sales said she was given the status ‘purely because of the lack of medical facilities available in Zimbabwe to treat her medical condition as HIV-positive’.

Her son came to Britain as a teenager in 2003 and was recognised as a refugee too. But in 2012, he was convicted of two counts of sexual activity with an underage girl and sentenced to three years in jail. The judge said: ‘There is no dispute that this constituted serious criminal offending. There is also no dispute that Mr Mosira qualifies as a foreign criminal.’

After the conviction Mosira was told he would be deported, and a four-and-a-half year legal battle over his right to stay began.

In 2013 lawyers for Mrs May told Mosira that his refugee status as someone fleeing persecution was being withdrawn.

But Lord Justice Sales said that, because the offender had never fled persecution, ‘it was open to doubt whether this was an appropriate procedural step to take’.

Over the next three years the case went through three immigration tribunal hearings, in which lawyers for Mosira said he would face ill-treatment in Zimbabwe because he was associated with the MDC opposition movement.

But tribunal judges found he was not associated with any political movement and faced no danger from dictator Robert Mugabe or his supporters.

They also pointed out that he and his mother had travelled to Zimbabwe in 2010 for his father’s funeral without any issues.

In 2014 a probation officer reported that Mosira posed a high risk of committing further sex offences, but by 2015 his probation officer had revised her opinion, saying he ‘posed a low likelihood of re-offending’ and was in ‘a healthy and supportive relationship with a partner’.

In the Court of Appeal in May, lawyers for the Home Office said for the first time that Mosira should not be treated as a refugee regardless of the reason he had been granted the status. Lord Justice Sales said this was ‘an arguable issue of law’ but ‘justice requires that we refuse permission to raise it at the eleventh hour on this appeal’.

He said ‘it is not fair to Mr Mosira to do so’, and it was also unfair to his lawyers who had not had a chance to prepare new arguments. The judges rejected an appeal by the Home Office that would have secured Mosira’s deportation, saying that the ‘very messy’ case against him had become ‘confused at an early stage’.

AN INSULT TO TERROR VICTIMS Yesterday’s Daily mail