In 2024, our insane asylum rules became impossible to ignore

The British state seems to be falling apart at the seams. And nowhere are its failures better illustrated than in its utterly dysfunctional asylum system – a system that, it is no exaggeration to say, now prioritises the rights of foreign criminals over the safety of law-abiding Brits.

During the course of this year alone, we have seen a string of cases involving foreign offenders committing crimes in the UK when they should not have been here to begin with. Time and again, violent criminals, traffickers and terrorists seem to have slipped through the net, or have been granted asylum for the most bafflings of reasons. The consequences of this have been devastating.

Even by Britain’s woefully lax security standards, the case of Abdul Ezedi earlier this year plumbed new depths. On 31 January, the 35-year-old Afghan national attacked a mother and her two young daughters with alkali in south London. The woman and her youngest daughter were severely injured. Doctors still fear the woman could eventually lose the sight in one eye. Ezedi himself took his own life shortly after the attack, and his body was later found in the River Thames.

This was a brutal attack carried out by someone who should have been deported years ago. Indeed, the authorities missed multiple opportunities to remove him from these shores long before he threw a corrosive substance over a mum and her kids. Ezedi first entered the UK in the back of a lorry in 2016. He then applied for asylum, but was rejected – twice. Yet he was still seemingly allowed to continue living here. Then, in 2018, he was convicted of one charge of sexual assault and one of exposure. In 2020, he was discharged from his probation supervision, but he was still not deported.

Quite incredibly, it is believed that, in either 2021 or 2022, the authorities decided to grant asylum to Ezedi, who by now was a convicted criminal, on his third attempt. On this occasion, according to reports, a priest vouched for Ezedi and claimed that he had converted to Christianity. Under the UK’s human-rights laws, this made it virtually impossible for Ezedi to be sent back to Afghanistan – with his legal team being able to claim that he would be at risk of Islamist persecution, having ‘left’ Islam and being an ‘apostate’ who was supposedly now Christian.

Ezedi, it turns out, is far from alone in exploiting this human-rights loophole. His case is part of a disturbing trend emerging of Muslim asylum seekers opportunistically ‘converting’ to Christianity to claim asylum and avoid deportation.

In April, news emerged of another jaw-dropping failure in the asylum system, involving another Afghan national. It was reported that a convicted sex offender and asylum seeker had avoided deportation on the extraordinary grounds that he would be ‘punished’ in his homeland because of his sex offences. In essence, he couldn’t be deported because he is a sex offender.

The man in his early 30s, and referred to only as DH, was given a 12-month prison sentence at a central London magistrates’ court after being found guilty of deliberately and repeatedly exposing himself in public. But at a subsequent immigration tribunal, his lawyers argued that his ‘sexually disinhibited behaviour’ would make him vulnerable to ‘serious harm’ in Taliban-run Afghanistan. His legal team claimed that denying him refuge would therefore breach his human rights. The tribunal judge agreed, and promptly awarded DH refugee status.

Then there is Brwa Shorsh. In February, the 24-year-old Iraqi migrant pushed 61-year-old Tadeusz Potoczek into the path of an oncoming Tube train at Oxford Circus station. Thankfully, Potoczek was pulled to safety by an alert member of the public. But his life should never have been put in such danger to begin with.

Shorsh had originally been smuggled into the UK in the back of lorry in 2018, after being denied asylum in Germany and France. In the course of his trial this summer, it emerged that he was already a convicted criminal with a very long rap sheet. A previous immigration-tribunal hearing was told that Shorsh had shown a ‘pattern of regular serious offending’.

In fact, Shorsh held a dozen convictions for a total of 21 offences, including assaults, anti-social behaviour and outraging public decency. At the time of the attack at Oxford Circus, he was appealing against his planned deportation. With this deeply troubling record of repeated criminality, how on Earth was Shorsh able to remain in the UK for so long?

These cases show how the UK’s asylum system is now failing everyone. Those most at risk of violence and persecution in their homelands – particularly, women and girls belonging to ethnic and religious minorities in conflict-affected territories – are festering on long waiting lists, unable to integrate into British society. Meanwhile, foreign male criminals are routinely allowed to remain in the UK, even when their applications fail. The security of the general public barely figures in any of this.

This past year has proven beyond all doubt that the UK’s asylum system is simply not fit for purpose.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.