Nigerian rapist who can't be deported because European judges say it would violate his right to family life

By Jack Doyle for the Daily Mail and Lydia Warren
Created: 12:30 EDT, 20 September 2011

A Nigerian rapist escaped deportation yesterday after European judges ruled he had a right to a ‘private life’ in Britain.

Akindoyin Akinshipe, 24, was due to be sent home after losing appeal after appeal in the British courts over his jailing for an attack on a girl of 13.

But in a staggering reversal yesterday, the European Court of Human Rights said this would breach his right to a ‘private and family life’.

Decision: The European Court of Human Right has ruled that a Nigerian man who committed a rape when aged 15 cannot be deported back to his home country

This is despite him not having a wife, long-term partner or children in the UK - factors which foreign criminals have used to stay here under Article 8 of the Human Rights Act.

The panel of seven – including judges from Bosnia, Albania and Montenegro – said the court must protect his ‘social ties’ with Britain, which have grown while he resisted deportation.

They said removing him from this country – where he works for a council and attends church – would be ‘disproportionate’ as he has committed no further offences and is no longer a danger to the public.

But critics accused the Strasbourg court of undermining Britain’s border controls.

Implications: The decision by the ECHR could hinder the Home Office's ability to deport foreign criminals

Tory MP Dominic Raab said: ‘It is a warped notion of human rights that allows a convicted rapist to claim the right to family life to avoid deportation.’

‘Inflated human rights claims threaten our border controls. It is vital we reform the Strasbourg court as well as UK law to restore some common sense.’

Last year failed asylum seeker Aso Mohammed Ibrahim, who ran over 12-year-old Amy Houston and left her to ‘die like a dog’ under the wheels of his car, used Article 8 to stay in this country because he has fathered two children here.

Anger: Tory MP Dominic Raab

In 2010 around 200 foreign criminals won the right to stay using Article 8, the right to a ‘private and family life’.

Tory ministers have pledged to replace the Human Rights Act – which enshrines the European Convention on Human Rights into British law – with a UK Bill of Rights.

But they have been opposed by their Liberal Democrat coalition partners.

Akinshipe spent his first 13 years living near Lagos in Nigeria.

He arrived in Britain in September 2000 with his two sisters to join his mother, who came four years earlier to work as a nurse.

Just two years later, at the age of 15, he was convicted of raping the 13-year-old.

But only one year and ten months into a four-year sentence in a young offenders’ institution, he was released for good behaviour.

The probation service said there was a low risk of him committing further offences. He won his initial appeal against deportation, but this was overturned by a tribunal which backed returning him to Nigeria because of the seriousness of the crime.

His family life in the UK did not go ‘beyond normal emotional ties’ the judge said.

His case was so flimsy that the Court of Appeal refused to hear it and in January 2008 his domestic legal avenues were exhausted.

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But astonishingly, two years elapsed before the Home Office began action to deport him in September last year. In the meantime, he had obtained three A-levels, and he was about to finish a degree in economics and banking.

He then appealed to Strasbourg. The European judges, citing his education and employment record and lack of any further crimes, said that since his release his conduct has been ‘exemplary’.

Ruling in his favour and awarding costs of nearly £3,500, they said he had made ‘commendable efforts to rehabilitate himself and to reintegrate into society over a period of seven years’.

They added: ‘It must be accepted that the totality of social ties between settled migrants and the community in which they are living constitutes part of the concept of “private life” within the meaning of Article 8’.

Tory MP Douglas Carswell said: ‘This shows that it doesn’t matter who you vote for and it doesn’t matter what the politicians promise when it comes to immigration, as long as we remain subject to the Convention rapists who we want to deport will be free to stay.’

Last night Akinshipe’s mother, Monisola Shrodeinde, who works as a hospital nurse in south London, said the decision was ‘very fair’.

She added: ‘We are very, very happy. It really is very good news for him.’

A spokesman for the UK Border Agency said: ‘We are extremely disappointed by this judgment and will consider the next steps carefully.

‘This Government is determined to remove foreign criminals from the UK and does not believe that Article 8, the right to family or private life, should outweigh the need to protect the public from serious criminals.’

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