Paedophile jailed for child sex abuse images can't be deported after judge deems it 'too harsh' on his children

28 October 2024, 08:35 | Updated: 28 October 2024, 10:21

A convicted paedophile has been granted permission to stay in the UK by a judge after successfully appealing a bid to deport him, claiming it would harm his family.

The Indian national had been jailed for 14 months in 2021 in relation to three counts of child sex abuse images.

The paedophile had also been handed a sexual harm prevention order, as well as being required to sign the sex offenders register for 10 years.

However, despite this, Home Office attempts to deport him have now failed after the man won a legal challenge on human rights grounds.

Lawyers for the Indian paedophile claimed the sentence was "unduly harsh" and that it would be unfair to separate him from his two children.

It comes despite court judges having previously prevented the man from having "direct unsupervised contact" with his two children.

The man's only current contact is said to be over video call, according to legal papers.

The case is now pending further appeals by the Home Officer, it's reported by the Mail Online.

Commenting on the case, Tory MP and leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick labelled the case "madness".

The MP, who's key leadership pledge is to see the UK leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), is citing it as yet another example of a misuse of the legislation.

The paedophile, who can only be referred to as "HS" after he was granted life-long anonymity, said deportation would damage his right to "private and family life" under Article 8 of the ECHR.

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As part of the appeal, judges in the upper immigration and asylum tribunal also flagged serious concerns over the handling of the case.

It follows a claim from an independent social worker, Laurence Chester, who concluded deportation would be too harsh on the man's children.

It's claimed the paedophile first came to the UK in 2002, before he went on to remain in the country illegally.

It's then claimed he married in 2010, before later winning temporary permission to stay here as a spouse.

"We find the independent social worker's failure to consider the nature of the appellant's offending... as a safeguarding issue that needed to be evaluated was an astonishing oversight," the upper court ruling said.

"Only passing references are made to the nature of the appellant's offending," it said.

The ruling had failed to acknowledge the "obvious weaknesses" in Mr Chester's report, which suffered from "startling omissions", it went on.

"By primarily relaying on the evidence of the independent social worker, the judge failed to engage with the evident shortcomings of his report," wrote upper tribunal judges Melissa Canavan and Matthew Hoffman.

"We also find that the judge failed to take into account the nature of the applicant's offending, which involved child pornography, and how this factored into the issue of contact with his children."