In a shocking legal twist, an Albanian criminal who was deported after serving a prison sentence for burglary has successfully won the right to remain in the UK—after sneaking back into the country in defiance of a deportation order.
Ardit Binaj, 32, was deported after serving just six months of a two-and-a-half-year jail sentence for burglary under a prisoner transfer agreement with Albania.
Binaj illegally entered the UK in the back of a lorry in 2014, but it wasn’t long before he was arrested for burglary the following year. In 2016, he was sentenced to 30 months in prison for the break-in, in addition to a six-month sentencefor another burglary and 18 weeks for a separate theft.
During Binaj’s initial appeal hearing, he claimed he had sought early release from prison to return to Albania to care for his ill grandmother, who later passed away. However, the judge rejected this explanation, concluding that Binaj had returned to Albania not out of family duty but to avoid serving his full sentence.
However, within months, Binaj breached his deportation order and re-entered Britain illegally to reunite with his Lithuanian girlfriend, who had been granted leave to remain under the EU Settlement Scheme. They went on to have a child and later married, paving the way for Binaj’s successful legal battle to stay in the UK.
Binaj’s Article 8 ECHR claim, which protects the right to a family life, was upheld after a tribunal ruled it would be “unduly harsh” on his wife and son to deport him again. This ruling comes despite his illegal re-entry to Britain and previous convictions for burglary and theft.
The tribunal heard that Binaj deliberately waited until his son was born in 2020 to increase his chances of staying in the UK. After his marriage to his partner, Diana Bolgova, Binaj applied for the right to stay under the EU Settlement Scheme, a bid that was rejected by the Home Office. The Home Office then moved to deport him again in February 2022.
However, his lawyers successfully argued that deportation would violate his right to a family life, citing his wife’s severe anxiety and depressive symptoms, exacerbated by tragic events in her family, including the “violent death of her mother and her grandmother’s illness.” The judge ruled that Binaj’s deportation would likely harm his wife’s mental health and be detrimental to their child.
Despite working illegally in the UK, the foreign court accepted his claim, and the judge ruled that deportation would breach his Article 8 ECHR rights. The case has reignited fierce debate over Britain’s membership in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), with critics arguing that it allows foreign criminals to evade deportation.
Boris Johnson has called for a referendum on the UK’s membership in the convention, stating that it prevents the country from having full control over its immigration policy and blocks efforts to deport criminals. In the ongoing Conservative leadership race, candidates have clashed over the issue, with Robert Jenrick promising to take the UK out of the ECHR entirely, while others like Tom Tugendhat and Kemi Badenoch have expressed willingness to consider leaving.
Jenrick, the former immigration minister, expressed outrage over the case, calling it another example of how the ECHR is preventing the UK from securing its borders.
“The convention has become a charter for criminals,” Jenrick said. “It has repeatedly provided loopholes for dangerous foreign criminals to remain in the UK, putting the British public at risk. Reforming Article 8 is a fantasy—the only way to stop farcical cases like this is to leave the convention altogether.”
As the debate over the UK’s ECHR membership continues, cases like Binaj’s fuel growing public frustration over the nation’s inability to deport criminals who have entered illegally and repeatedly broken the law.
With every case like this, the arguments to leave the ECHR grow louder.
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It is time to pull out of the European Convention of Human Rights. The European Courts should have no jurisdiction over the UK. Please sign the petition.Main Photo:Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
