[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]

The absurd claims that foreign criminals make to avoid deportation from the UK, and that the relevant courts have accepted, beggar belief. A few examples of these claims that convicted criminals make and that UK authorities accepted as valid reasons not to be deported can be found here: “You Can’t Make This Up: The Insane Reasons Criminal Migrants Stay in the UK,” by Frank Haviland, European Conservative, September 24, 2025:

…Abdul Ahmadzai is currently appealing deportation. Having fled across the Channel post-conviction for raping a 14-year-old girl in France, Ahmadzai is now represented by a lawyer concerned about Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights: “No one shall be subjected to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

One wonders what terrifying degree of heinous torture this might refer to. Is it the prospect of three Cordon Bleu meals a day that is troubling Ahmadzai, the Brigitte Bardot lookalikes likely to be ‘manning’ the jails, or the Johnny Hallyday mixtape emanating from the adjacent cell? Nope. In fact, it’s the cell size. According to Ahmadzai’s lawyer, there is the very “real risk” that his client could be “detained in a space fewer [sic] than three metres squared” if he were sent back to Paris.

Ahmadzai’s appeal has been adjourned until October, until which time he will remain in custody—presumably enjoying at least three square metres of prime real estate. Assuming that French prisons truly are torturous, I can’t help wondering why the French authorities aren’t under pressure to ship their entire prison population across the Channel; and, more to the point, whether it will be Macron or Starmer who first suggests doing so?

While Ahmadzai’s case may sound absurd, it is in fact bread and butter to our ECHR overlords and the human rights lawyers who routinely employ specious pretexts to foist violent criminals on the British public. To give a comprehensive account of all such abuses would probably require a biblical tome, so allow me to just give you the recent highlights:

• Konrad Makocki, a Polish serial criminal with nine convictions, including violence and domestic abuse, successfully blocked his deportation on the grounds that he had become a “father figure” to his nephew. Not only would expulsion therefore breach his “right to a family life,” it would also cause his nephew to suffer a “disproportionate” impact if his uncle were deported.
• Fatmir Bleta, an Albanian national convicted in absentia of shooting a man in the head with a Kalashnikov rifle, won the right to remain in the UK on the grounds that not being entitled to a re-trial would breach his Article 6 human rights.
• An anonymous Pakistani father, jailed for 18 months after attempting sex with “barely pubescent” girls, successfully avoided deportation on the basis that it would prove “unduly harsh on his children to be without their father.”
• Klevis Disha, an Albanian, first appeared on UK shores as an unaccompanied minor. Giving a false name and falsely claiming to have been born in the former Yugoslavia, Disha was stripped of his citizenship in 2021, after serving two years in prison when caught with the £300,000 ‘proceeds of crime.’ Astonishingly, Disha cannot be deported because of his son’s aversion to ‘foreign’ chicken nuggets….
• Ernesto Elliott, a Jamaican, successfully dodged deportation thanks to his “right to a family life.” In gratitude, Elliott went on to add murder to his extensive rap sheet, alongside knife, drug, and firearm offences. This case was particularly noteworthy, as it involved the flight famously grounded by left-wing MPs and celebrities. They wrote an open letter to then-Prime Minister Johnson, demanding all further deportations be cancelled because of the “unacceptable risk of removing anyone with a potential Windrush claim”.

Thanks to our membership of the ECHR, all Britain has to do then is attract criminals without families, children, claustrophobia, or any specific dietary requirements….

These British judges have clearly gone haywire, accepting the most absurd reasons that convicted foreign criminals put forth as to why they should not be deported, including “depriving their children of a family life” and alarm over the “small” size of the cell — nine square feet — that they might be held in if deported to France, and a murderer avoiding deportation to Jamaica because he has “a right to a family life,” and his family now lives in the UK. But of course, there is nothing preventing them from moving to Jamaica to be close to their imprisoned paterfamilias.

A mad world, my masters!