End of ‘family life’ dodge for all foreign prisoners?
Deportation law goes further amid rights shake-up
ALL foreign criminals who have served a jail sentence could be blocked from using the ‘right to family life’ to dodge deportation.
Amid widespread concern that foreign offenders are exploiting family links with the UK to avoid being kicked out of the country, measures unveiled by Dominic Raab yesterday went much further than previously expected.
The threshold could be as low as any ‘offenders sentenced to a term of imprisonment’, according to the Justice Secretary’s proposals, with a spokesman confirming this could refer to any jail sentence however short.
Currently, under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), deportations can be blocked for criminals freed from jail if they successfully claim they have family links here. The new proposals have sparked a backlash from human rights campaigners who have accused the Government of wanting to ‘put themselves above the law’.
Martha Spurrier, director of human rights organisation Liberty, said: ‘This plan to reform the Human Rights Act is a blatant, unashamed power grab... [The Government] are quite literally rewriting the rules in their favour so they become untouchable.’
Sacha Deshmukh, chief executive of Amnesty International UK, said: ‘If ministers move ahead with plans to water down the Human Rights Act and override judgments with which they disagree, they risk aligning themselves with authoritarian regimes around the world.’
Stephanie Boyce, president of the Law Society which represents solicitors, urged caution, adding: ‘Any reform of this subtle and carefully crafted legal instrument should be led by evidence – not driven by political rhetoric.’
Mr Raab’s proposals said public faith in human rights had been eroded as criminals’ human rights
‘Unashamed power grab’
are ‘given greater weight than the safety and security of the public’.
Setting out a number of options to curtail human rights in deportation cases, the plans said: ‘It could be clarified that certain rights, such as the right to family life, cannot prevent the deportation of a certain category of individuals, for example, offenders sentenced to a term of imprisonment, or persons involved in terrorist-related activity.’
Alternatively, courts could be required to place protection of the public above an offender’s right to family life under a set of rules approved by Parliament, they said.
A third option would leave the decision-making on deportations to the Home Secretary alone.
As reported in yesterday’s Daily Mail, Mr Raab also wants to filter out ‘spurious’ or ‘vexatious’ human rights cases at the first hurdle.
But it has been stressed that ministers would not attempt to deport offenders to countries where they would face torture or ill-treatment.
Dr Ben Greening, executive director of Migration Watch UK which campaigns for tougher border controls, said it was ‘high time’ for reform of human rights claims in deportation cases.
However Labour’s justice spokesman Steve Reed said the party will ‘oppose the Human Rights Act being ripped to shreds’.