An Albanian drugs criminal will not be deported, more than six years after the Home Office ordered his removal, because officials failed to prove that drugs cause harm.
The Albanian, who served six months in prison for growing cannabis, won his appeal after the Home Office failed to show an immigration judge that his offence had “caused serious harm”, the legal test for deporting a foreign national jailed for less than twelve months.
In place of evidence about the harm caused by his crime, the Home Office quoted a promise made by Gordon Brown at the 2007 Labour Party conference that foreign drug producers “would not be allowed to remain in the UK”.
First-tier Tribunal Judge Boyes ruled that the speech was “not sufficient to fill the evidential gap”, and that “a standard few paragraphs statement from a Police officer about the harm caused by drugs” would have been “more than sufficient” to secure his removal.
The ruling, revealed here for the first time, was signed on 2 November.
The Albanian, who cannot be named for legal reasons, defended himself with a series of claims: that he was the target of a 30-year blood feud in which his grandfather had killed two brothers from a rival family; that he had been trafficked into Britain and forced to grow cannabis; that the Albanian police would not protect him; and that separating him from his British wife, or sending her to live in Albania, would be unduly harsh.
The judge dismissed all of them. He found the feud unproven, the trafficking account “vague and inconsistent”, the Albanian state capable of protecting him, and the effect on his wife not unduly harsh.
The man won on one point only: the Home Office had not shown that his crime caused “serious harm”.
