Latest news with #foreigncriminals
Telegraph
15-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Cleverly at odds with Badenoch over ECHR
Sir James Cleverly suggested that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) would not necessarily lead to more foreign criminals being deported, in an apparent split with Kemi Badenoch. The former home secretary said other European countries who were signatories to the convention were 'much better at deporting criminals' than Britain. He added that he was 'not convinced' that withdrawing from the ECHR was a 'silver bullet', as he warned of 'political activism' within the UK's own legal system. His comments come after Mrs Badenoch, the Conservative leader, launched a review on whether Britain should leave the ECHR, saying that she was 'increasingly of the view' that it would be necessary. The ex-contender for the Tory leadership also appeared to warn the Conservatives not to 'outbid' Reform UK by offering bolder and undeliverable promises to the electorate. Deporting foreign criminals Speaking at an Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPE) event on Tuesday, Sir James said: 'The bottom line is, other signatories to the ECHR are kicking out foreign criminals much more than we are, and other countries that are not signatories to the ECHR are also struggling.' He told the event in London: 'I'm not convinced the ECHR is, on its own, a silver bullet.' Sir James added that he wanted to see how the party's review into the issue, led by Lord Wolfson, the shadow attorney general, 'pans out'. The MP for Braintree said: 'One of the points I would make, however, is that when I was home secretary, I noticed that we had one of the lowest deportation rates amongst our European neighbours. 'And when I asked, they'd say, 'Oh, you know, ECHR'. And I'm like, 'Yeah, but the other countries that are much better at deporting criminals than we are – much, much, much better – are also signatories to the ECHR. So what are they doing differently to us?' 'Unfortunately, the general election came along before I got a credible answer,' he added.
Telegraph
14-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
This is how justice has gone so awry in twenty-first century Britain
A while back I came across some people who were actually being deported by the Home Office. They were an American couple running the only shop in a remote part of Scotland. Locals were up in arms about the nice couple being booted out. I think of them when I see stories about some of the people who are allowed to stay in this country by our courts. The Ugandan murderer who clubbed a man to death in the back of an ambulance but was allowed to stay because of his mental health. The Pakistani paedophile was allowed to stay because his life would be at risk back home. The Jamaican murderer who can't be deported because a rival criminal gang in his native country might harm him. Welcome to justice in twenty-first century Britain. Judges, some of whom are also pro-migrant activists, have decided that the rights of foreign criminals are more important than the right of everyone else to live in safety; there are more than 10,000 foreign national offenders living in the country. There's a pattern here. The British state persecutes the law-abiding while coddling dangerous people. This worst-of-both-worlds has been dubbed 'anarcho-tyranny'. Examples of it abound. Take Martyn's Law. Security Guard Kyle Lawler was suspicious of Manchester bomber Salman Abedi, but did not confront him because, he says, he didn't want to be branded a racist. Rather than confronting this real problem, Parliament instead passed a law requiring village halls and small events to draw up bureaucratic terrorism action plans. Exactly as predicted, the cost of this bureaucracy has led to events being closed for the law-abiding population: Shrewsbury Flower Show (started in 1875) has folded, to some extent, because of the extra costs of security. Horrific knife crimes have become common. In July 2015, we passed a law saying adults convicted for a second time or more of carrying a knife must receive a minimum six-month prison sentence. But judges are ignoring it – four in ten are not jailed, despite the clear view of Parliament. Instead of fixing the problem, the BBC and others are promoting an absurd campaign to ban pointed kitchen knives, with celebrity endorsements from people like Idris Elba. That's anarcho-tyranny in action: don't jail criminals but take away granny's cheese knife instead. If you, a law-abiding person, want to open a bank account or invest money you will face layers of bureaucracy. God help you if you are self-employed. But if you want to set up a blatant money laundering operation like some of the candy stores of Oxford Street or open the 14th 'Turkish Barber' in a tiny town, then HMRC will barely touch you. I get my train ticket checked every day. But staff on the tube stand idly by while people jump over the ticket barriers. When Robert Jenrick made a film pointing this out, Transport for London (TFL) threatened to prosecute him for 'filming illegally'. Recently, tube trains on the Bakerloo and Central lines have been covered in graffiti. Various groups have started cleaning off the graffiti. What has been the TFL's response to this? They complained about people cleaning up the graffiti and then claimed they had put it there themselves. This is the instinct of anarcho-tyranny. Attack the law abiding and the victims, rather than deal with the problem; in two tier Britain, not all protests are equal. Women protesting the Sarah Everard case had their faces squished to the floor. BLM protesters were treated with kid gloves; while everyone else was instructed to stay home to stop covid, they were allowed to gather in Whitehall for a protest that turned into a riot. British police arrest more than 30 people a day for online posts, double the rate in 2017. Even the ultra-liberal Economist magazine argues Britain has a problem with free speech. One of the worst things about anarcho-tyranny is its arbitrary nature. According to a Policy Exchange report, in 2023, Essex Police recorded 808 'Non-Crime Hate Incidents' (NCHIs). Meanwhile, West Yorkshire Police, a force with 38 per cent more police officers than Essex, recorded only 146 NCHIs. In the last three years Essex police spent time logging two NCHIs every single day – but only solved 6 per cent of burglaries and 3 per cent of rapes. It is terrible that free speech is being policed like this, but somehow even worse that what you can say now depends on where you happen to live, and the whims of local officials. But then, that's the whole point. Persecuting the law-abiding makes officials feel powerful and important. The numbers arriving in small boats are soaring under Starmer, and the number of terrorists and criminals who we can't deport because of human rights is ever-growing. At least ugly new barriers have been recently put up around Parliament to protect us MPs and Peers. By a quirk of timing the work started in the week when the Mayor of London gave a stirring speech declaring that we must 'build bridges, not walls'. He said this after spending recent years having to install ugly concrete anti-terrorism walls on the ends of all of London's bridges, which law-abiding people must walk round. The mayor spent money on an ad campaign declaring 'London is open', but for the law-abiding London is less open: when I was born you could walk up Downing Street, or go into parliament without airport style security. In the grooming gangs scandal, we saw how the authorities turned on the victims and those who tried to blow the whistle. People like detective Maggie Oliver, youth worker Jayne Senior and even Labour MPs Ann Cryer and Sarah Champion paid a career penalty for speaking out; Champion was made to quit her job in the Labour front bench in 2017. Labour first tried to block an inquiry and are now pushing through a definition of 'Islamophobia' that I'm sure would have been used against those whistleblowers. Our politics are upside down. We pamper those who do the wrong thing, while we punish those who try to do the right thing. It's anarcho-tyranny. Don't like it? Well, choose your words carefully, or you'll end up in jail.
Daily Mail
05-07-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Now SNP back Westminster plans to send foreign prisoners back to their home countries
SNP ministers have admitted they support sending foreign criminals back to their home countries to ease the overcrowding crisis in Scotland's prisons. A 'law enforcement' paper drafted by the Scottish Government states that immigrants languishing behind bars are contributing to the 'unprecedented pressure' on jails. Latest Scottish Prison Service (SPS) figures, show that 679 inmates held in Scottish jails are foreign-born out of a total of 8,145. At the same time, prison bosses have expressed serious concern that a spike in overall prisoner numbers may spark riots. Already, Justice Secretary Angela Constance has authorised the early release of almost 500 inmates serving shorter sentences to free up space. Now, the Scottish Government has said it backs the expansion of so-called prisoner transfer agreements (PTA), which see criminals sent back home to serve their sentences. The deals have already been signed with Albania and Poland by the former Tory and the current Labour government respectively. A new paper released by the Scottish Government states: 'The government supports the UK Government's work to agree prisoner transfer agreements with certain EU member states but believes that a more holistic approach would deliver greater results. 'In particular, securing an EU-wide Prisoner Transfer Agreement which allows for more streamlined procedures for the transfer of prisoners should be a priority for any discussion around improving UK-EU cooperation.' PTAs with EU member states allow criminals to be automatically repatriated if they meet certain criteria, such as length of sentence. In return for taking the offender back, the UK pays the prisoner's country of origin to accommodate them, which costs far less than holding them in British jails. It has been hailed as an effective way to free up space in prisons while saving millions of pounds. Last night Scottish Conservative justice spokesman Liam Kerr welcomed the SNP's position. He said: 'At last. It's a relief to see this soft-touch SNP government finally adopt a common-sense Scottish Conservative proposal to tackle Scotland's prisons population crisis.' The Scottish Government document sets out that 'leaving the EU meant that the UK left the world's most highly developed and sophisticated ecosystem for law enforcement and criminal justice co-operation', and that 'Brexit made the UK and Scotland less safe'. One particular concern highlighted by civil servants was that leaving the EU had made it harder to send sentenced criminals back to their own country. They said the UK now relies on a 1980s convention, which 'has created a number of additional barriers to prisoner transfers'. The report reads: 'These additional barriers have contributed to the unprecedented pressure on Scotland's prison system and broader public services.' The SNP has already tried to ease pressure on crammed jails by releasing some inmates early. The Scottish Conservatives have consistently called on the Scottish Government to expedite the deportation of foreign criminals to free up prison space. Leader Russell Findlay said ministers could use a discretionary power to release some offenders up to 180 days early to facilitate their removal by the UK Home Office. The UK Government is reforming deportation and removal rules which will make it easier to remove foreign criminals committing crimes in the UK. UK Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has said foreign criminals should expect to be deported and said last month that human rights law should not prevent foreign criminals from being removed. A spokesman for the Scottish Government said: 'The government supports increased co-operation with the EU and an EU-wide prisoner transfer agreement as we have pointed out that one of the harms of Brexit is that important matters such as prisoner transfer have been made more difficult.'
The Herald
03-07-2025
- Politics
- The Herald
Minister wants foreign offenders to serve time in countries of origin
Foreign criminals sentenced to jail time should ideally be deported to their countries of origin to serve their terms, says correctional services minister Pieter Groenewald. He hopes the home affairs department can assist with deportations of foreign offenders granted parole. His department spends R11m a day on inmates from other countries, he told parliament's correctional services portfolio committee on Tuesday. 'The South African taxpayer foots the bill for more than 24,000 foreigners in correctional facilities. Calculated at R463 per day, this results in an expense of R11,112,000 per day. 'We are exploring various solutions, including diplomatic approaches.' Anna Molepo, the department's chief deputy commissioner of community corrections, previously told the committee the number of sentenced foreigners in South African prisons was 12,676 in January 2025, which was 12.4% of the sentenced inmate population. The committee was briefed in February on the challenges the department faced, including the legal issues that affect deportation orders and the processing of foreigners. The department said it was working to ensure the Immigration Act aligns with the relevant frameworks. On Tuesday, Dereleen James, an ActionSA MP, called for accelerated deportation policies. 'Prisoners live in relative comfort while our communities are being destroyed, broken, under-resourced and forgotten,' James said. The R463 daily cost per inmate could fund 555,600 loaves of bread, enough to feed 277,800 households with two loaves each.
Telegraph
25-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Farage: Foreign criminals write to me asking to be deported
Nigel Farage has said that criminals are writing to him from prison begging to be immediately deported back to their home countries. The Reform UK leader said he had received four letters from foreign criminals who wanted to be deported but had been unable to secure their removal back to their countries of origin. One letter was from a Lithuanian offender who was serving 15 years and six months for grievous bodily harm with intent at HMP York. In a video on X, Mr Farage said the criminal had told him in the letter: 'I am a foreign national prisoner. I am desperate to be deported back to Lithuania. Why won't the UK get rid of us? This must be costing about £50,000 a year to keep me here.' 'I would have thought we should get rid of him rather quickly,' said Mr Farage. A second prisoner from India said he came to Britain on a year-long visa but had since spent two years in jail at HMP Ashfield in Gloucestershire. 'It must be costing the taxpayer millions,' the Indian wrote in his letter. The two other prisoners are Lithuanian and Spanish. Foreign criminals themselves are now writing to me asking to be deported. You couldn't make this up! — Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) June 25, 2025 Mr Farage welcomed new plans – announced by Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary – to speed up the deportation of foreign offenders by reducing their sentences they have to serve in the UK to a fraction. He said the 'bizarre' approaches that he was receiving from foreign prisoners held in the UK demonstrated why there was a need and demand for the Government to fast-track foreign prisoner deportations. There are nearly 11,000 foreign prisoners currently held in UK jails at a time when they are facing an overcrowding crisis that has forced the early release of thousands of criminals. Foreign offenders represent nearly one in eight (12 per cent) of the 88,000 prisoners in English and Welsh jails. Each is costing the taxpayer £54,000 a year, which amounts to a total of nearly £600 million. 'These people should be deported immediately and the idea that we are allowing out, through early release, prisoners back into the community, many of whom have reoffended in a serious way, is absolutely extraordinary,' he said. 'So once again the British government is seeing the big problem, saying it will do something about it but will they actually deliver. 'The message from me is simple. If you are a foreign national, you commit an offence, you don't spend time in our prisons. You get sent straight back to your home country.' He suggested the UK needed to negotiate more prison transfer agreements where the Lithuanian offender, for example, could be sent back to their home country to serve whatever was required from the remainder of their sentence under their country's laws. Conversely, the UK would take back any British prisoners serving in other countries. Under the scheme being introduced by Ms Mahmood, offenders will be eligible to be deported 30 per cent of the way through the custodial part of their sentence rather than at 50 per cent. Combined with the current early release scheme at 40 per cent of a prisoner's custodial sentence launched by Ms Mahmood last year, it means that foreign prisoners will serve just 12 per cent of their sentence instead of the current 20 per cent or 25 per cent. Foreign prisoners will not have to serve the rest of their sentence in their home country under the scheme, but will be barred from ever returning to the UK. If they are caught breaching the order by sneaking back into Britain, they will be forced to serve the rest of their sentence.
