Another new year, and on the very first day we hear of two cases where human rights law has made a laughing stock of our immigration system.
Gjelosh Kolicaj, an Albanian migrant given dual British citizenship after marrying a British woman (whom he later divorced), turned out to be a senior crime boss. After he got six years for money laundering, the Home Office said he should be stripped of his citizenship and deported. Immigration judges quashed the order: insufficient consideration had been given to his right to family life under article eight of the European Convention on Human Rights (from two children born here to a later wife) and a probation report suggesting a low (but not non-existent) risk of reoffending.
The second case concerns a Sudanese man the security services say is an Isis propagandist. Granted asylum and then British citizenship in 2015, he repaid us by continuing to foment terrorism, at the same time apparently paying regular visits to supposedly unsafe Sudan.
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