A judge has ruled that an Iraqi who arrived in Britain illegally on a small boat in 2021 cannot be deported yet, because he claims he has lost his identity documents, despite him having already been refused asylum in Italy and Sweden.

An Indian paedophile who was jailed in 2021 for distributing child sex abuse images, has been able to avoid deportation under the ECHR, claiming that it would affect his family life because he has two children here, even though he is only allowed to have weekly video calls with them.

A Zimbabwean who killed a man and seriously injured another after causing a car crash while high on drugs and drink, has also avoided deportation because a DNA test after he left prison revealed that he’d fathered a love child. A tribunal ruled that the “emotional impact” it would have on the boy would breach the ECHR.

These three stories, all of which broke across a period of just three days this week, reveal how broken our immigration system is and why leaving the ECHR is necessary to restore control to our borders. No serious state can countenance the continued presence of serious criminals within its borders just because of a spurious threat to family life, a threat which only exists due to their own criminal actions.

As the example of the Iraqi illegal immigrant shows, British domestic law also has many failings, not least as the ECHR was brought into domestic law by the Human Rights Act, with our ability to deport people shrinking as human rights case law expands. Actually taking back control of the borders would therefore require serious reform at home too.

It simply shouldn’t be feasible that missing ID documents are enough to prevent deportation. In recent years, one of the biggest groups of asylum seekers crossing the Channel were Albanians. Most arrived without identity documents. Why would they do that when a Wizz Air flight from Tirana to Britain can easily cost under £100? That’s far less than the thousands of pounds necessary to cross the Channel.

The answer is that, without identity documents, it’s harder to prove they are claiming asylum under false pretences. If they come on their passport, their claim would be swiftly dismissed. The pretence of losing them gives them a chance at asylum and more time in Britain, which many have used to join organised crime groups here.

Arguments against this usually claim that we would lose rights, or that we would lose our international standing, or that other countries in the ECHR deport more than we do, or that it would be difficult to achieve. 

This ignores that other ECHR nations with independent judiciaries also only deport a minority of those they ought to, that Britain was famous for its liberties before the ECHR, that non-membership doesn’t seem to affect the standing of key allies like the USA or Australia, and that any difficulties pale to the obvious injustice of forcing the British people to live alongside dangerous foreign criminals.

Our lax asylum system encourages those refused asylum elsewhere to try their luck here. Without that desperate hope, people wouldn’t be risking their lives in the Channel, where more have died this year than last year. By enabling such bad faith asylum claims, it’s also unfair on the minority of genuine asylum seekers, who are tainted by association. For their good and the good of the British people, it’s time to change our broken asylum system.