‘The number of foreign criminals avoiding deportation on human rights grounds has hit the highest level for five years.
Cases have nearly tripled since political pressure over abuse of human rights helped force successful claims down to a record low.
It comes amid concern about legal challenges to block deportations after dozens of Jamaican criminals had to be removed from a Home Office charter flight earlier this week.
When Theresa May was home secretary, she told the 2011 Tory party conference that Labour’s Human Rights Act ‘needs to go’ and that the meaning of one crucial clause had been ‘perverted’ to prevent removals.
The Home Office redoubled its efforts to fight cases in the immigration courts.
By 2016 the European Convention on Human Rights and other humanitarian laws were used in only 60 successful applications by foreign criminals. The following year they more than doubled to 144.
By 2018, the most recent whole year for which figures are available, the number reached a five-year-high of 172 – the most since 212 in 2013. In the first six months of last year alone 100 deportations were blocked on human rights grounds. If cases continued at the same rate the total was on track to reach levels not seen since 2013.
The Daily Mail obtained the troubling new data under freedom of information laws.’
