The Immigration Farce
by Michael Shrimpton
Michael OgundimoI am not sure whether he intended to or not but Olufisayo Ogundimo may have helped to make legal history.
He has just won an appeal against deportation in front of my old friend Sir Nicholas Blake, President of the Upper Chamber of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal. An able advocate before he became a judge His Lordship once appeared in front of me, on the old Immigration Appeal Tribunal.
Mr. Ogundimo is a convicted Nigerian narcotic trafficker, and is anxious not to be sent back to Nigeria. After notice of the Home Office intent to deport him he decided to have another child, or maybe that just happened accidentally.
Either way he successfully used Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights to overturn the deportation decision.
This has upset the Home Secretary, a rather silly woman, with respect, named Theresa May. Aware of the political damage the Coalition Government’s failure to control immigration was causing she got the House of Commons to approve a fatuous change in the Immigration Rules. She claimed this would curtail the impact of the right to family life in Article 8.
Mr. Ogundimo and Mr. Justice Blake have now exposed that claim for the hollow sham it was. I am not by the way criticising the learned judge’s decision. He was quite right to give priority to Article 8. That is because it has statutory force, thanks to the daft Human Rights Act 1998. A statute trumps an immigration rule any day. I would probably have been forced to give the same decision, although I might with respect have used different language.
The only way round the problem is to repeal the Human Rights Act 1998. That the Coalition will not do. It is a sacred cow for the Liberal Democrats and a repeal bill would break up the Coalition. David Cameron is also pro-EU and he won’t get rid of it either. The ECHR is a Council of Europe instrument but it is linked to the EU, both by treaty amendments and in intelligence terms. The ECHR and Treaty of Rome were drafted by agents of the same agency, the DVD. For the UK to pull out of the ECHR and scrap the Human Rights Act would be a significant political statement. It would send a signal that we are on our way out of Europe.
Mr. Ogundimo’s successful attempt to impose himself on the UK against the wishes of the House of Commons is bound to increase the political pressure on Cameron and the Coalition. Cameron is headed for a heavy defeat in this week’s crucial by-election at Eastleigh in Hampshire, caused by the conviction of former Lib Dem Cabinet Minister Chris Huhne for perverting the course of justice. We Tories are in a desperate competition with the United Kingdom Independence Party for 2nd place.
My guess is that Cameron will be forced out by the end of May. The Coalition will break up and there will be a General Election. The new Tory leader will be a Eurosceptic, committed to withdrawal from the EU. He or she will have to be, in order to end the split on the right. The Eastleigh by-election is proof of the damage that split is doing. A once safe Tory seat cannot be won because of the number of voters switching to UKIP, even in a seat where the sitting MP was convicted of being a perverter and is looking at some jail time.
Eastleigh has been in the headlines before by the way. Its last Tory MP was found dead in the middle of a sex game with another politician, although the other guy’s role was hushed up. GO2, the German operation in London, used his involvement to blackmail him, forcing him to support EU membership. GO2 has assets in Special Branch, who were involved in the clean-up. It’s usual procedure to call them in when one MP hangs another in the middle of a sex game.
Mr. Ogundimo can take pride in the role he has played in helping to bring down the Coalition Government and getting the Human Rights Act repealed. Unfortunately for him that will remove the last remaining barrier to his deportation, although the new government may be sufficiently grateful to send him home business class.
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Michael Shrimpton was a barrister from his call to the Bar in London in 1983 until being disbarred in 2019 over a fraudulently obtained conviction. He is a specialist in National Security and Constitutional Law, Strategic Intelligence and Counter-terrorism. He is a former Adjunct Professor of Intelligence Studies at the American Military University.
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