An Eritrean man can be deported under the government’s ‘one in, one out’ scheme, a High Court judge has ruled.
It’s the second case to come before the High Court this week – in the first, separate, case another man’s deportation was temporarily blocked.
Lawyers acting for the migrant in today’s case said he was due to be deported at 6.15am on Friday morning, but argued he had a “number of different medical needs” and that he has been a “victim of trafficking”.
Mr Sheldon said the Home Office had provided “material to say that France does deal with trafficking in more or less the same way as this country”.
Sonaili Naik KC, representing the migrant, also told the High Court that her client’s case had been rushed.
She said: “They have just simply expedited a decision, for the purposes of trying to rush to maintain a removal.”
The same judge temporarily blocked another migrant from being deported on Tuesday night, in a move the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood called “intolerable” and vowed to “fight”.
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This decision also led to the Home Office revising its policy on reconsidering modern slavery decisions, so that anyone removed to a safe country who wants to appeal against a National Referral Mechanism (NRM) decision – which identifies and assesses victims of slavery and human trafficking – will now be unable to do so.
Instead, they can now appeal via judicial review from another country, such as France.
Ms Naik told the High Court this afternoon: “The secretary of state [Ms Mahmood] has today come to this court to say, without notice to the claimant, that the procedures in France are fine, it is all safe, no problems, the trafficking claims will be dealt with.
“Our prima facie case is that the secretary of state needs assurances from France that that is the case, that non-French nationals trafficked in Libya will have access to the NRM there.”
But Sian Reeves, for the Home Office, responded that there was “no arguable public law error” in the way Ms Mahmood altered the policy, given that “she had ample evidence”.
The government lawyer added that there was “no serious issue to be tried” as the migrant’s alleged “trafficking claim can be investigated in France”. She insisted to the court that his deportation could go ahead, as his “rights are protected” there.
Earlier in the day, the first deportation of someone who has illegally crossed the English Channel took place under the terms of the government’s “one in, one out” migrant return deal with France.
The Home Office confirmed a man who arrived by small boat in August was sent back to France on a commercial flight at 6.15am.
An Eritrean man was originally due to be the first migrant to be returned, and was scheduled to be flown to France at 9am on Wednesday. But this was blocked by Mr Sheldon on Tuesday.
The department has said further deportation flights are due later this week and into next week.
The UK-France deal was signed in July and saw the first migrants detained in the UK to await deportation in August.
It allows the UK to send back a migrant who crosses the Channel illegally in exchange for accepting the same number of migrants in France who have a valid asylum claim.
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