Immigration judges granted a child sex offender the right to enter Britain, after ruling that barring him would breach his human rights.
As reported in the Daily Mail, Jamaican paedophile Oniel Spence, 43, applied to come to the UK in 2023 to join his wife and child, who are both British nationals. Spence had been jailed in the US for a sexual offence against a 15-year-old girl. The Home Office blocked him, arguing that his exclusion was “conducive to the public good”. Spence then appealed against that decision and won.
His lawyers argued that refusing him entry breached Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which protects the right to ‘private and family life’. The lower immigration tribunal and upper immigration tribunal both agreed. Only when the case reached the Court of Appeal was the ruling overturned. Even now, the case has merely been sent back for a fresh hearing, so Spence may yet win his case and be allowed to enter the country.
Conservative Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp called this another example of “the tyranny of the judiciary” and said that “we must leave the ECHR, abolish the immigration tribunal and end the power of the courts over immigration”.
This is a bold statement from a party that had 14 years in government to do something about this problem, but refused to.
Cases like Spence’s did not materialise out of thin air the moment Labour took office. They happened under the Tories, again and again. Successive Tory governments repeatedly allowed foreign criminals to use the human-rights framework to resist deportation.
In 2019, a Jamaican drug dealer resisted deportation after judges accepted that removing him would have an “unduly harsh” impact on his British son. In 2021 and 2022, two Rochdale grooming-gang perpetrators fought deportation to Pakistan on human-rights grounds, including the right to private and family life. In 2020, a Jamaican criminal avoided removal after last-minute human-rights appeals - six months later, he murdered someone.
All these cases took place under the Tories’ watch.
This is the system the Conservatives now claim to oppose. But when they were in power, they left the ECHR untouched, along with Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act, which wrote the European laws into British law.
Reform UK’s Shadow Chancellor and former Tory minister Robert Jenrick spoke of exactly this problem within the Conservative Party - that they would frequently say one thing in public, and the opposite in private. Announcing his defection from the Tories to Reform UK back in January, he said: “I will never forget attending a cabinet meeting in Downing Street where a plan to stop the boats was signed off. But everyone to a man and a woman around that table knew in their hearts it was not going to work. Some even joked about it.”
It was not just that the Tories were unable to wrestle back control from judges, lawyers and tribunals because they were thwarted by bureaucracy. According to Jenrick, “the principles were betrayed because a critical mass don't believe in those principles at all.”
The Tories now claim they want to strip immigration judges of their power. But his party had a thumping majority, five prime ministers and 14 years to make that happen. They failed to change the law when it mattered. There is no reason to believe they would change it now if given the chance.
Only Reform UK can be trusted to end this farce. Reform UK will leave the ECHR, scrap the Human Rights Act, and deport all foreign criminals. We will put decisions about who enters and remains in Britain back where they belong - in the hands of elected politicians, not activist judges. Reform UK will do what the Tories never had the courage - or the conviction - to do.
As reported in the Daily Mail, Jamaican paedophile Oniel Spence, 43, applied to come to the UK in 2023 to join his wife and child, who are both British nationals. Spence had been jailed in the US for a sexual offence against a 15-year-old girl. The Home Office blocked him, arguing that his exclusion was “conducive to the public good”. Spence then appealed against that decision and won.
His lawyers argued that refusing him entry breached Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which protects the right to ‘private and family life’. The lower immigration tribunal and upper immigration tribunal both agreed. Only when the case reached the Court of Appeal was the ruling overturned. Even now, the case has merely been sent back for a fresh hearing, so Spence may yet win his case and be allowed to enter the country.
Conservative Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp called this another example of “the tyranny of the judiciary” and said that “we must leave the ECHR, abolish the immigration tribunal and end the power of the courts over immigration”.
This is a bold statement from a party that had 14 years in government to do something about this problem, but refused to.
Cases like Spence’s did not materialise out of thin air the moment Labour took office. They happened under the Tories, again and again. Successive Tory governments repeatedly allowed foreign criminals to use the human-rights framework to resist deportation.
In 2019, a Jamaican drug dealer resisted deportation after judges accepted that removing him would have an “unduly harsh” impact on his British son. In 2021 and 2022, two Rochdale grooming-gang perpetrators fought deportation to Pakistan on human-rights grounds, including the right to private and family life. In 2020, a Jamaican criminal avoided removal after last-minute human-rights appeals - six months later, he murdered someone.
All these cases took place under the Tories’ watch.
This is the system the Conservatives now claim to oppose. But when they were in power, they left the ECHR untouched, along with Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act, which wrote the European laws into British law.
Reform UK’s Shadow Chancellor and former Tory minister Robert Jenrick spoke of exactly this problem within the Conservative Party - that they would frequently say one thing in public, and the opposite in private. Announcing his defection from the Tories to Reform UK back in January, he said: “I will never forget attending a cabinet meeting in Downing Street where a plan to stop the boats was signed off. But everyone to a man and a woman around that table knew in their hearts it was not going to work. Some even joked about it.”
It was not just that the Tories were unable to wrestle back control from judges, lawyers and tribunals because they were thwarted by bureaucracy. According to Jenrick, “the principles were betrayed because a critical mass don't believe in those principles at all.”
The Tories now claim they want to strip immigration judges of their power. But his party had a thumping majority, five prime ministers and 14 years to make that happen. They failed to change the law when it mattered. There is no reason to believe they would change it now if given the chance.
Only Reform UK can be trusted to end this farce. Reform UK will leave the ECHR, scrap the Human Rights Act, and deport all foreign criminals. We will put decisions about who enters and remains in Britain back where they belong - in the hands of elected politicians, not activist judges. Reform UK will do what the Tories never had the courage - or the conviction - to do.
