HOME OFFICE ministers were last night slammed for being unable to say how many foreign criminal deportations are being blocked by European human rights laws.
The government faced demands to retrieve the “basic facts” surrounding a growing row over the courts repeatedly thwarting removals of migrant offenders.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has vowed to tighten the laws following a massive backlash against foreign offenders dodging deportations on spurious ECHR grounds.
One Albanian drug dealer notoriously argued against his return because his son did not like the country’s chicken nuggets.
Tory peer Baroness Porter used a parliamentary question to demand how many removal attempts have been stopped by court appeals.
But Home Office Minister Lord Hanson – while hailing the 4,436 removals since the election – said his department does not have data on how many have been blocked.
He said: “Figures on the number of deportations that did not proceed due to the legal challenges, whether under the ECHR or otherwise, is not currently available from published statistics.”
However he said work was “underway” to improve the department’s information on foreign national offenders.
He added: “If this work progresses as planned, the Home Office intend to publish more detailed information on FNOs subject to deportation.”
Baroness Porter said: “The government needs to take urgent action on Foreign National Offenders, how can they do this if they don’t even have basic facts about what’s going on.
“With UK prisons full to bursting, getting foreign offenders to serve their sentences in their home countries needs to be a priority, as does returning foreign offenders once they’ve finished serving their sentences.”
Ms Cooper has pledged to introduce legislation to throw out dodgy appeals to the ECHR’s Article 8 right to a family life.
