July 22, 2016
Britain has been ordered by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to pay $20,000 to a convicted Iranian sex offender whose deportation Britain failed to pursue energetically in the court’s eyes.
The judges ruled that the Iranian, who lives in London, was unlawfully held in immigration detention pending his removal for more than a year, during which time the authorities showed a “woeful lack of energy and impetus” to deport him.
Of course, the Islamic Republic has always refused to accept deportees.
The Home Office (the UK equivalent of an interior ministry) was told to pay him 7,500 euros in damages and 10,000 euros in costs and expenses—the equivalent of $20,000—for his unlawful period of detention.
JN, 45, unsuccessfully claimed asylum when he arrived in Britain in 2003 and was given 12 months in prison and a deportation order after being convicted of indecent assault.
He spent two periods totaling 55 months in immigration detention pending his deportation between 2005 and 2009.
He was released for a month after a court order. He was detained again when he failed to comply with the court conditions by securing travel documents from the Iranian embassy. He was finally released on bail in 2009 when he brought a judicial review action to the High Court in London.
The ECHR ruling said JN repeatedly refused to cooperate with Home Office attempts to persuade him to go back to Iran voluntarily and so rightly remained in detention for fear he might abscond or reoffend.
But the judges also backed a judgment of the British High Court that the Home Office then adopted “a sterile tactic” of “merely sitting and waiting while repeatedly urging [him] to change his mind in the full expectation that he would not,” which amounted to a “woeful lack of energy and impetus” in trying to secure his deportation.
They concluded that his detention from mid-2008 to September 2009 was a breach of the Human Rights Act’s right to liberty and security because from this point Britain failed to pursue his deportation with “due diligence.”