The answer to this question is very easy: fear of charges of “Islamophobia.”
“‘Why did it take so long to deport Rochdale grooming gang members… as they continued to walk our streets?,’” by Charlotte Green, Manchester Evening News, October 28, 2022:
Rochdale’s MP has called for an inquiry into how members of the borough’s infamous grooming gang which avoided deportation for years were able to walk its streets – and bump into their victims.
It was confirmed this week that two members of the Rochdale grooming gang, Adil Khan and Abdul Rauf, had lost their appeal against deportation from the UK, following a seven-year-long battle in the courts.
Both men, now aged 51 and 52 respectively, were among nine gang members jailed in 2012 for a catalogue of child sex offences. Khan, then in his 40s, impregnated one girl, refusing to accept the child was his until a DNA test was done.
Following their conviction they were told they would be sent back to Pakistan after their release from jail. But both Khan and Rauf fought against deportation on the grounds that it would interfere with their human rights, mounting multiple legal challenges and appeals.
However the judges concluded, in a decision made in August and released publicly on Wednesday, that there was a ‘very strong public interest’ in their removal.
Rochdale MP Tony Lloyd has now written to Home Secretary Suella Braverman asking for the deportation to be ‘speedily enacted’.
He has also called for an inquiry into how the deportation process was drawn into a convoluted legal battle, and why they were allowed to freely continue walking Rochdale’s streets after their release from prison.
The former police and crime commissioner wrote: “As you will be aware, these men were given prison sentences for cruel and depraved attacks upon young girls and women.
“There can be no doubt that on the conclusion of those sentences they should have been speedily deported. This did not happen.
“Due to the failure of Home Secretaries, those deportations were blocked which then, astonishingly, allowed these men to continue to live in Rochdale with no effective limit on their behaviour and no constraint to protect the women who had been their victims from turning a street corner and seeing their abusers.
“I am writing to ask firstly that you now clarify the position of the Home Office as a matter of urgency to ensure that the decision of the court is speedily enacted, especially given that the immigration judges indicated there was ‘very strong public interest’ in deporting the pair as soon as possible.”
Mr Lloyd added: “Equally importantly is the need for an inquiry to learn the very sad lessons from this saga.
“Specifically we need to understand why the then Home Secretary failed to ensure that deportation orders were issued to be effective at the conclusion of prison sentences that allowed these men to go through a near decade of legal proceedings on the basis that they had renounced their Pakistani nationality, and the extraordinary cost to the tax payer of over half a million pounds in publicly funded legal fees.
“Equally challenging is the question as to why there was no conditionality placed on the residence of these men as a condition of their early release from prison. As I have said before, this put their victims at risk of turning a street corner and meeting those who abused them….
