19th December. Many foreign criminals at large in the UK.
In the middle of December there was a flury of intererst in parliament and the media about foreign criminals freely going around in Britain having been released from Prison. And this was not just a few people – apparently currently there are nearly 4,000.
Essentially there were two problems. The first was Article 8 of the European Commission’s Human Rights Legislation and how this was intepreted by the British courts.
The second problem was getting the necessary travel documents ready for deportation.
Article 8 states:
- 1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
- 2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Frequently claims by lawyers that a defendant has a right to family life or some other human right have been used to override other considerations and the defendant has been freed.
With the second problem (getting the necessary travel documents ready for deportation), it turned out that – and this is quite amazing – foreign criminals were successfully obfuscating the attempts to get the documents.
Thus the independent chief inspector’s report (ICIR) on the management of foreign national prisoners concluded that:
“Whilst the time taken to secure travel documentation does vary from country to country, the timescale for obtaining a document is mainly dependent on the compliance of the FNP. Non-compliance covers a range of behaviour but it centres on frustrating removal by refusing to cooperate with attempts to obtain travel documents, for example by adopting a false identity, nationality swapping, refusing to engage with the UK Border Agency, or refusing to engage with embassies (our emphasis).
“We estimate that this is a significant issue in around 60% of long term detained foreign national prisoners. Documentation can be arranged quite quickly in most circumstances when the FNP is compliant, takes longer with the semi-compliant FNP and takes a very long time with the non-compliant.”