Albanian burglar's crimes not ‘extreme' enough for deportation

Times

2 days ago

A serial burglar with nearly 50 convictions cannot be deported back to Albania after a judge ruled that his offending was not sufficiently 'extreme' to provoke public 'revulsion'.
An immigration appeal hearing was told that Zenel Beshi had been jailed for six years in Italy for robbery, theft and false imprisonment, and that he had failed to disclose his convictions after arriving in Britain.
Home Office officials argued that Beshi, who is in his mid-forties, posed a 'genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat' to the UK and should be deported.
Judge Leonie Hirst acknowledged that Beshi's offending was 'serious and prolific' but ruled that his crimes were not of the 'very extreme' type that would cause 'deep public revulsion'.
She upheld the decision of a lower tribunal to allow him to remain in the UK.
Earlier, the upper tribunal was told that Beshi, a member of an Albanian criminal gang, was sentenced by appeal judges in Turin to six years in prison in 2017 after being convicted of robbery and false imprisonment as well as 44 charges of burglary and theft.
He was released from prison by 2020 and moved to the UK, where he applied for a European Economic Area residence card as his spouse was an EEA citizen.
That application was initially refused because Beshi had not provided evidence that his partner had EU treaty rights, but he successfully appealed and was granted a residency card.
However, while awaiting the outcome of that appeal, he applied for leave to remain under the EU settlement scheme, which was implemented after the UK quit the bloc.
Whitehall officials told an immigration judge that Beshi had not disclosed his previous burglary convictions. And in 2022, a year after his residence card was issued, officials moved to deport him on the grounds he posed a 'genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat' to the public.
Beshi's settlement application was rejected on the same day.
He took his claim to the lower tribunal in 2023, which, after hearing evidence from a psychologist, concluded that he was at low risk of reoffending and did not pose a serious threat to society.
On that basis, Beshi was allowed to remain in the country. But Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, appealed against the ruling, arguing that the tribunal had misapplied the burden of proof, used the wrong threshold for protection from deportation, taken the incorrect approach to deportation and not given clear conclusions.
In her ruling on that appeal, Hirst said that the issue of whether Beshi had disclosed his convictions was at best of 'limited relevance' to whether he should be allowed to stay in the UK.
Backing the initial ruling, the judge said that while Beshi's 'previous offending was clearly both serious and prolific', the evidence 'did not on any view indicate that it was of the very extreme type of offending causing deep public revulsion which would justify expulsion'.
Hirst praised the original judge's 'detailed, clear and well-structured' consideration of the case and said that there had been no error in law.
The senior judge accepted that the original ruling had 'expressly recorded' that the psychologist had noted inconsistencies in Beshi's account, 'which appeared to indicate that he was minimising his culpability'.
But Hirst supported the lower tribunal's view that 'notwithstanding those issues', Beshi was at 'low risk of violence and low risk of serious harm to others'.
She added that the Home Office had failed to provide evidence to support the case that the Albanian should be deported and that officials' criticisms of the original judgment were 'not well founded'.