Tricky lying foreigners trick Supreme Court into allowing them to stay in UK #bastards

Legal research can be dull but the main facts are right there on the net for journos to see

The Daily Fail Heil er I mean Mail today reports on two awful Albanians who tricked the Supreme Court into letting them stay in the UK despite their having lied to the wonderful, faultless British Government by claiming they were from Kosovo. They report that “Dinjan Hysaj and Agron Bakijasi pretended to be victims of ethnic cleansing when they came to the UK in the 1990s, but were ordered to leave the country when their lies were exposed.” Lawyers for the pair wracked up bills of “£1million in legal aid” (yeah right – in fact the Supreme Court ordered a detailed assessment of costs and no figure was quoted in the case but in any event a cool mil sounds unlikely to me) fighting deportation by arguing that lying about nationality was not enough to remove British citizenship… oh did we forget to mention that they are British citizens and the case is really about whether they should be deprived of citizenship?

The Mail says that this could lead to thousands more being allowed to stay, although no source backing up this claim has been cited by the otherwise completely credible newspaper (Wikipedia is unreliable and even they won’t accept a Mail story as evidence of a fact).

In fact, the Mail (and many other commentators) are talking what can best be described as a pile of shit, of the variety produced by a bullock no less.

The two cases “discussed” by the Mail are R (on the application of Hysaj and others) v Secretary of State for the Home Department, Bakijasi v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2017] UKSC 82. The cases were heard together on the 21^st December 2017 on application by the Secretary of State who applied for the “appeals to be allowed”.

No, you didn’t misread that last bit – the Secretary of State, Amber Rudd MP, applied to the Supreme Court asking for judgment to be given against her own Department! So, when the Mail reports that lawyers for the to Albanian men have wracked up a million pounds in legal aid bills and imply that the Supreme Court has decided the case against all reason you might want to remember that they did no more than the Government asked them to do!

The real scandal here is that the Home Secretary spent years pursuing these people through the court, wasting vast amounts of tax-payers and leaving three men, and their families, in fear that they would lose their citizenship and be deported only to turn around at the last minute and admit that they were wrong all along.

What did the Secretary of State ask the court to find then? A draft order was put forward by the Home Office and accepted by all parties and the court. The Secretary of State accepted in that drafter order that both the men bringing the appeal were British citizens and that the decisions she had previously obtained against them in the High Court and Court of Appeal were both wrong in law. She went on to accept that the children of both men were also British citizens. This was important because one question that needed resolving was whether a nullified grant of citizenship to the father would also nullify his children’s citizenship.

So, there you have it. When you read outrageous things in the press about judges, legal aid and foreigners make sure you also read the actual judgment where it’s available because the two frequently tell completely different stories.