On Tuesday, Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, claimed that, in the case of Philip Lawrence’s murderer, Learco Chindamo, ‘we were misled by the system’. That is true: it is monstrous that the 26-year-old Chindamo, who stabbed the head teacher to death in December 1995, will now escape deportation to Italy, the country of his birth.
On Tuesday, Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, claimed that, in the case of Philip Lawrence’s murderer, Learco Chindamo, ‘we were misled by the system’. That is true: it is monstrous that the 26-year-old Chindamo, who stabbed the head teacher to death in December 1995, will now escape deportation to Italy, the country of his birth. But to see who is responsible for ‘the system’, Mr Straw need only look in the mirror.
It was he, after all, who as home secretary in October 2000 hailed the Human Rights Act as ‘a major step-change in the creation of a culture of rights and responsibilities in our society’. True, the Act only incorporated into domestic law the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights, to which Britain was already a signatory. But the convention’s formal passage into statute has dramatically accelerated a trend that has debased the language of human rights to the point where it is now little more than the grotesque Esperanto of those seeking to escape natural justice or exploit our contemptible compensation culture.
In his appeal against deportation, Chindamo’s lawyer cited Article 8 of the Act: the right to a family life. The relevant section of the judgment delivered on 17 August by the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal would be comic if it were not
so stomach-churning. The three tribunal members muse on the case law and the right of applicants such as Chindamo ‘to live full and fulfilling lives’, ‘his private and social existence’, their duty ‘to protect him as far as possible from notoriety’, and the desirability that he stay in the United Kingdom where the killer ‘has a home, a supportive family, supportive agencies and language skills’.
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