The revelation that a Turkish heroin dealer has been allowed to stay in Britain has refocussed attention on the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and how criminals use it to evade deportation.
The 70 year old, who has been granted anonymity, is an Alevi Kurd and argued he would be persecuted as such if returned to Turkey.
He is said to have been one of the UK’s biggest drug dealers – once responsible for 90 per cent of the UK heroin trade – and jailed for 16 years for plotting to supply the drug.
But he won the right to remain in Britain, relying upon Article 8 of the ECHR, which protects the right to a family life. This is despite having an extramarital affair during a trip to Turkey.
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He is one of many dangerous criminals who have cited the ECHR to avoid deportation – here are just some of them.
Abu Qatada
Successive Labour and Conservative governments spent years trying to deport radical cleric Abu Qatada to Jordan, where he was facing multiple terror charges.
Despite being accused of having links to terrorist organisations, he claimed asylum in the UK in 1993 on a forged passport.
The Court of Appeal ruled in 2008 that if he was deported he could face a new trial and be tortured as part of efforts to obtain evidence from him.
The European Court of Human Rights then ruled in January 2012, using Article 6 of the convention, that he might lose the right to a fair trial due to the risk of torture if he were returned to Jordan.
It was only after the UK and Jordan ratified a treaty explicitly clarifying that evidence potentially gained through torture would not be used against him in his trial, that he was eventually returned deported to the Middle Eastern state on July 7, 2013.
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He was later acquitted of multiple terrorism charges.
Fatmir Bleta
Wanted for murder in his home country of Albania, in a judgment revealed by The Telegraph earlier this year, Bleta, 64, won the right to remain in the UK on the grounds that deportation would breach his Article 6 rights to a fair trial under the ECHR.
He fled Albania in December 1998, two months after allegedly shooting a man in the head with a Kalashnikov rifle, for which he was convicted and sentenced in absentia to 13 years in prison.
After coming to Britain with his family, he sought asylum, falsely claiming to be Kosovan. They were refused asylum but granted indefinite leave to remain. He gained British citizenship in 2017 but was subsequently convicted of making an untrue statement to procure a passport, along with three other counts of dishonesty. In 2018, he was jailed for 33 months and two weeks. After completing his sentence, the Home Office sought to deport him but two judges ruled that there was a “real risk that returning the claimant would amount to a flagrant breach of Article 6 ECHR”.
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Speaking to The Telegraph in October, Bleta denied being convicted of murder and said he had been cleared. “I’m clear of everything,” he said.
Gjelosh Kolicaj
By the time the National Crime Agency caught up with Albanian-born crime boss Kolicaj, he and his gang had managed to smuggle nearly £8 million of profits from his group’s enterprises in the UK to his homeland.
He arrived in Britain in 2005 and secured indefinite leave to remain two years later after marrying a British woman. He later gained full citizenship and, by February 2009, had a UK passport.
Having gained dual nationality, he divorced his wife to marry an Albanian woman with whom he has children.
But the career criminal was jailed for six years in 2018 after pleading guilty to conspiracy to remove criminal property from the UK, prompting the Home Office to try and strip him of his citizenship and deport him. The attempt failed after his lawyers successfully argued it would be a breach of this right to a family life under Article 8 of the ECHR.
Ardit Binaj
The Albanian national arrived in Britain in a lorry in 2014 and just two years later was handed a 30 month sentence for one burglary, alongside a six month prison term for another and 18 weeks for a separate theft.
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Under a prisoner transfer agreement, he was deported to Albania but he returned after just five months, breaching the deportation order, to be with his Lithuanian girlfriend who had leave to remain in the UK under the government’s EU settlement scheme.
The pair then had a baby and married. Earlier this year, The Telegraph revealed that he had claimed any second removal from Britain would breach Article 8 of the ECHR, the right to a family life. His lawyers argued that his wife was suffering severe anxiety and depressive symptoms.
Wahbi Mohammed
Despite being jailed for his role in planning the failed bomb attempts on 21/7, 2005, Mohammed has evaded deportation to Somalia, with his lawyers claiming there is a risk of him being tortured if he is returned, breaching Article 3 of the ECHR.
He stood trial at Kingston Crown Court in 2008 with four others, accused of assisting the 21/7 bomb plotters. The five were accused of providing the gang with safe houses, clothing, food, passports and assistance during their escape.
Mohammed was found guilty and was jailed for 17 years, later reduced to 13 years on appeal.
It is understood the Home Office has repeatedly tried to deport him to Somalia – to no avail.
Learco Chindamo
One of the most notorious cases was the killer of school headteacher Philip Lawrence. Chindamo was just 15 years old when he fatally stabbed Lawrence outside St George’s Roman Catholic Comprehensive School in London in 1995. Having been handed a life sentence for the crime, the Home Office tried to deport him to Italy, where he was born.
But Chindamo’s lawyers successfully argued that sending him there would be a breach of his human rights, and said it would be an illegal move as he was from an EU country and had already lived in the UK for 10 years by the time of the crime.
The judgment found there would be “insurmountable obstacles” to the Chindamo family living in Italy and concluded that the government had not “shown the breach of Article 8, right to a family life… would be proportionate”.
Jumaa Kater Saleh
In November 2004, UK border officials opening the back of a lorry found 16-year-old Saleh. He had travelled more than 3,000 miles from his home in war-ravaged Sudan and was seeking asylum in Britain.
Despite his application being rejected, Saleh was given leave to remain until his 18th birthday. Because of the backlog in cases, he remained in the country thereafter, however, and made a further application to remain for “humanitarian protection”.
But in May 2007, he was arrested over serious sexual offences, part of a gang of five men who lured underage girls into a house for sex. In 2008, he was convicted of two “sample” offences of sexual activity with a 13-year-old girl. He was sentenced to four years in a young offender institution.
He completed his sentence in May 2009 after his sentence was discounted automatically to two years, but his offence meant he was due for automatic deportation.
In an appeal against the deportation, his lawyers argued that he was at risk of being tortured if he was returned to Sudan, under Article 3 of the ECHR – and in May 2011, the immigration tribunal ruled that a return would constitute a breach of his human rights.
During his legal battle he was detained at Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre at Heathrow. He later won damages after the Court of Appeal ruled he had been held in custody for too long during the failed attempts to deport him.
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