Europe backs ‘human rights’ of Zimbabwean thug we tried to deport
JUDGES in Europe have ruled that Britain breached the human rights of a Zimbabwean serial criminal by locking him up while he challenged deportation.
The Government was told it acted unlawfully by holding the convicted drug dealer in immigration detention for too long.
The European Court of Human Rights said the then illegal immigrant was wrongly caged for seven months – while officials tried in vain to boot him out.
Judges in Strasbourg accepted there was a risk the criminal, who can only be called SMM, might abscond if granted bail. But they said the Home Office should have ‘taken more decisive steps’ to determine his second asylum bid, which meant he was detained illegally.
He had argued his treatment violated Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which safeguards liberty.
He had sought £100,000 in compensation for his alleged ordeal – but this was rejected. Instead, Britain was ordered to pay £6,150 to cover his court costs.
The 35-year- old has run rings around the Home Office by thwarting repeated attempts to boot him out of Britain for years before he was finally granted discretionary leave to remain in January 2013.
He currently lives in Wembley, north-west London, and is seeking to continue to live here.
The case will strengthen calls for Britain to quit the ECHR.
Conservative MP Philip Davies, a leading Eurosceptic, said: ‘The human rights laws have fallen into disrepute because of cases like this. They seem to defy any kind of logic or common sense whatsoever.
‘This man should not have carried out a string of crimes if he was worried about being detained and deported. The man on the street will be shaking his head in disbelief at this ruling.’
Theresa May was a long-standing critic of the ECHR – complaining that during her six years as home secretary it had thwarted attempts to remove terrorists and foreign criminals.
But the Tory manifesto last month said Britain would be bound by European human rights laws for at least another five years if they won the general election – fearing it would prove a distrac- tion from Brexit. SMM arrived in Britain in 2001 on a six-month visitor visa – but did not leave. In 2004 and 2005, he was convicted of driving while disqualified and without insurance, assaulting a police officer and failing to surrender to custody.
He applied for asylum in April 2005 but this was refused and he vanished. In August 2007, he was convicted of possessing Class A drugs with intent to supply and was jailed for three years. In March 2008, he sought sanctuary a second time, claiming that eight years earlier he had been beaten up and tortured in Zimbabwe by Robert Mugabe’s henchmen.
After completing his sentence in November 2008, he was placed in immigration detention – where he spent two years and ten months. In February 2011, then home secretary Mrs May refused his asylum application. Despite ongoing attempts to deport him, SMM – who had mental health issues – was granted bail seven months later. Senior immigration judges then granted him asylum in November 2012.
He then complained to the ECHR that he should not have been locked up because of his alleged torture and psychological state. Both of these claims were thrown out by European judges.
The court said SMM’s behaviour was ‘to some extent contradictory, on the one hand asking for more time to submit documents to support his asylum claim and on the other hand complaining about the length of his detention’.
But they concluded that despite officials not acting in ‘bad faith’, his detention from mid-2010 to February 2011 was a breach of his human rights because immigration officials failed to pursue his deportation with ‘due diligence’.
However, the ECHR confirmed that Britain was not compelled to set down maximum time limits for immigration detention.
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’.
‘Contradictory behaviour’