Why was an Eritrean sex offender set free to rape again?

News reports of illegal migrants committing gruesome crimes are now so routine in Britain that it’s easy to become numb to them. But we cannot allow the case of Radiet Meles, an illegal migrant and now serial sex offender, simply to slide from the news pages until the next horror story comes along.

Meles arrived in the UK in 2015 on the back of a lorry via the Channel Tunnel. He was caught and detained in Dover for two days before he was inexplicably released into the community. This was the first missed opportunity. Meles then moved to Cardiff before settling in Newport, where he picked up his first conviction. In 2018, he was caught attempting to rape an unconscious woman at a house party. In 2019, he was sentenced to five years in prison. The sentencing judge told Meles that, after his release, it was ‘likely’ he would be ‘held in an immigration detention centre’ and then ‘deported’. Needless to say, this did not happen.

On his release from prison, Meles was neither deported nor even monitored. This was the second missed opportunity. And so, seven years after his first sexual-assault conviction, he was free once again to prey on women. Last week, the 35-year-old was found guilty of rape and assault by beating, having attacked a woman back in March this year. He will be sentenced in November.

Will Meles finally be deported after serving his time for his second brutal sexual crime? It seems unlikely. After all, illegal migrants, including sex offenders, can count on an army of sympathetic immigration lawyers and ideologically captured tribunal judges, armed with the European Convention on Human Rights, to fight their corner. The victims of their crimes have no such protections.

Even putting all the legal barriers to deporting criminals aside, Meles’s case is instructive. It shows that, even in those vanishingly rare instances when a judge thinks it appropriate to deport a sex offender, this will not necessarily be followed up with any action. This is as much a story of state failure and institutional neglect as it is about the woke capture of the British state. Meles had never been granted asylum or refugee status, or the right to work or live in Britain by some other means. Indeed, why would anyone bother with the legal processes when the border is practically never enforced?

Radiet Meles did not slip through the cracks. He was set free – repeatedly. And until Britain’s borders are actually upheld, cases like this will be the norm, not the exception.