We Need to Talk About Our Judiciary (Again)
A look at the British judges presiding over deportation cases.
Just days ago, Sun reporter Thomas Godfrey exposed another judge whose background poses a direct conflict of interest with her work in the Immigration and Asylum Tribunal.
Such judges hear and decide cases involving deportation matters. They sit within the Immigration and Asylum Chamber of the First-tier Tribunal and, for appeals on points of law, the Upper Tribunal.
Godfrey discovered Judge Leonie Hirst, a former member of a refugee charity, is the same judge who has repeatedly blocked the deportations of “asylum seekers” convicted of various crimes.
In June, she refused to deport a serial Albanian burglar with almost 50 convictions because his crimes were not “extreme” enough. In her eyes, they apparently did not cause “deep public revulsion”.
Before that, in May, she permitted a Guinean asylum seeker convicted of knife and drug offences to stay because he was “socially and culturally integrated”. This was despite periods of homelessness and repeated criminal offending.
She further agreed with an initial tribunal hearing that there was “no error” in finding the migrant “would not be enough of an insider in Guinea to be accepted there”, as he came to the UK as a minor.
In April, she also stopped the deportation of a Jamaican rapist because, ironically, she considered his crimes too severe, which would put his "life at risk" in his home country.
The rapist’s mother had been caught up testifying in a murder case, risking possible retribution, with the Jamaican Ministry of National Security refusing to confirm whether he would accepted back into witness protection.
If Hirst’s now-deleted X account is anything to go by, she certainly holds some strong views. She revealed as much in a post about the prior Conservative government’s immigration bill:
For reference, she wasn’t some minor advisor in that charity. She served as a director of the now-closed Refugee Legal Centre.
Now, she rakes in £180,810 per annum (most of these judges earn over £170,000) in a role where her activism can take root.
To the untrained eye, such blatant conflicts may seem unlawful.
How did the judicial vetting process miss them? Why hasn’t Yvette Cooper’s Home Office used this as grounds to review and challenge these rulings?
Why remains speculation. What is certain is that Hirst is far from an exception.
Last month, Conservative MP Robert Jenrick spotlighted the curious background of another immigration judge, one Judge Melissa Canavan.
Before being appointed and permitting a 24-year-old man of Somalian heritage convicted of dealing crack cocaine to stay in Britain because he was “naive”, Canavan worked (again) for the Refugee Legal Centre.
The Upper Tribunal immigration judge also volunteered on cases to prevent asylum seeker deportations for the Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID).
BID is a charity that “exists to end immigration detention in the UK”. They “dream of a world free of immigration detention”, even, it seems, if migrants illegally enter Britain.
In 2005 and 2006, BID even publicly thanked her in an annual report.
She later wrote about the Ugandan civil war in the Socialist Lawyer, the magazine of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers—an organisation that “stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their struggle for liberation”.
It may not come as a surprise that last year, she refused to deport another Jamaican rapist who claimed he did not know having sex with a sleeping woman was wrong.
The predator said he was bisexual and previously suffered abuse for his sexual orientation in Jamaica. Canavan agreed and ruled there was enough evidence to show a risk of “anti-gay violence and discrimination”.
It’s true. Homosexuality is banned in Jamaica. But there was little evidence the rapist was bisexual in the first place. Arguing against his claim, Home Office lawyers insisted they only found evidence of him with women.
Then there’s Judge Fiona Beach—yet another figure whose image is either scrubbed from the internet or has somehow avoided public view.
Last month, Beach ruled that French-born criminal Christian Quadjovie, 26, posed no threat to the British public, despite him having spent over 963 days in prison for weapons-carrying and supplying Class A drugs.
She granted his appeal against deportation because he was not a “genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat,” citing recent lifestyle changes.
In a rather embarrassing turn of events, Beach’s ruling was later overturned. Government lawyers successfully argued her judgment went “against the weight of evidence.”
In short, it didn’t have much—let’s say—substance.
In 2005, as with Judge Canavan, Beach was thanked in a BID report for representing asylum seekers pro bono.
But then Conservative Party researchers found a bigger bone.
Companies House records showed Beach served as a director of Asylum Aid, which “delivers high quality legal representation to some of the most vulnerable people seeking asylum in the UK”.
Upper tribunal immigration judge Rebecca Chapman is another one of note.
She recently gave two Albanians lesbians the right to remain in Britain, insisting that they would face persecution for their sexual preferences if deported.
The curious thing is, Albania decriminalised homosexuality in 1995 and in 2010 adopted a law that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
This was before she ordered a rehearing of an Iranian man’s asylum claim, because he had shared political views on Facebook and had “so many friends” on the platform that returning him would risk persecution.
Little did we know, Judge Chapman has also dabbled in the charity sector—for Refugee Legal Support, another group that offers legal aid and assistance to migrants, including those who cross the Channel.
In 2020, five years into her role as an immigration judge, Chapman gave a talk on the European Convention on Human Rights, showing how to fight deportations if an asylum seeker’s home country lacks proper healthcare.
Putting it into context, yes, someone who helps immigrants enter the country also holds judicial power to decide whether they can stay—and has even coached her fellow barristers on how help migrants thwart deportation.
Judge Greg Ó Ceallaigh KC, based at Garden Court Chambers—a set renowned for challenging Home Office deportations—also works as a deputy upper tribunal judge in the Immigration and Asylum Chamber.
In April, Ceallaigh spared a convicted cannabis dealer from deportation after the convict claimed that he only committed the crime because he ran out of money during the Covid pandemic.
Ceallaigh concurred with the first-tier tribunal ruling that the dealer was at a “very low risk of reoffending”, despite government lawyers arguing that no thorough investigation had taken place to substantiate that claim.
When The Times dug into Ceallaigh’s background it got worse.
Not only had he posted in support for Labour’s decision to scrap the Conservatives’ Rwanda scheme, but he had also reposted a message from Asylum Aid on LinkedIn calling for the full repeal of the Illegal Migration Act.
In 2012, he further wrote on Facebook: “The Tory party conference helpfully clarified things: voting for a third party is not an option. They need to be dealt with as you would deal with the Nazis, cancer or lava.”
That’s an active judge comparing the soft-liberal Conservative Party that oversaw record migration to Nazis.
What’s more curious, however, is that Ceallaigh has been working on immigration and deportation cases as a barrister, while simultaneously presiding over others as an immigration judge.
In March, only months after his appointment to the Immigration and Asylum Chamber, Garden Court Chambers announced that Ceallaigh helped a man wrongfully exiled from Britain reunite with his family.
In other words, he’s been actively fighting on behalf of migrants to stay in Britain in one role, and blocking deportations in another.
Of course, we can’t forget Judge Sarah Pinder.
In February, Pinder permitted a convicted Zimbabwean paedophile to avoid deportation because he would face “hostility” if he was deported back to his home country.
Even though the Home Office said that it would not disclose the predator’s offences to the Zimbabwean authorities, for Pinder, that wasn’t good enough.
She later blocked the deportation of a Jamaican drug dealer who beat his partner. This was because his “gender-questioning” child only felt comfortable speaking to him.
She added that the career criminal’s mixed-race children would suffer “unmet emotional needs”, not just from losing a parent, but from losing the parent who “represents half of their cultural identity.”
Skip forward a few days, and researchers found Pinder had authored dozens of articles for the pro-open borders website Free Movement.
The outlet boasts a host of immigration barristers and activists as editors, all advocating for more lenient border controls.
Some of the arguments she made in those articles? Exactly as one might expect—calling for opening new routes for Afghan migrants and relaxing existing visa laws.
Last but not least, we come Judge Gemma Loughran.
In February, she blocked the deportation of a Nigerian woman who tried and failed eight times to secure asylum in Britain after joining a terrorist organisation just to boost her claim.
Loughran actually acknowledged the Nigerian was not being honest about her political beliefs.
She, nonetheless, ruled that the failed asylum seeker’s activities on behalf of the group meant she had a “well-founded fear of persecution” under human rights laws due to her “imputed” political opinion.
As Sam Bidwell uncovered, Loughran previously worked for Refugee and Migrant Justice, yet another charity which advocates for a more lax asylum system.
She has a long track record of defending migrant criminals, including a 38-year-old Iranian man who arrived illegally in 2002, had two asylum claims rejected, and was later jailed for intent to supply drugs.
Be in no doubt, if you think seeming political bias among judges is confined to immigration tribunals, you’d be wrong—very wrong.
Just last week, a High Court judge ruled in favour of the Home Office to keep a migrant hotel open in Epping, Essex, despite the fact that it had housed an Ethiopian asylum seeker now convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.
One of the judge’s stated concerns? That closing the hotel might fuel more protests because it’d show they can be successful.
He further described the protests as “unlawful,” even though the vast majority were categorically peaceful and had remained so outside dozens of other migrant hotels across the country.
These seemed like strange comments from a senior judge. But then it started to make sense.
The Telegraph found the judge, Sir David Michael Bean, who sits on the Court of Appeals, is a former Treasurer for the Society of Labour Lawyers—a think tank that calls itself an “affiliated socialist society”.
The Court of Appeal is the highest court within the Senior Courts of England and Wales that sits above the High Court of Justice in the legal hierarchy, only below the Supreme Court.
Additionally, he was a founding member of left-leaning law firm Matrix Chambers—a barrister set that continuously fights in favour of asylum cases and boasts Attorney General Lord Hermer as a former member.
It was also found that Bean edited a publication that detailed how to fully incorporate the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) into British law back in 2005.
Bean has reportedly been a Labour Party member for 28 years. His ties to left-wing causes go on. But one seems of particular interest: his father, Sir George Bean, was once chair of the 141-year-old Fabian Society.
In short, we have a former barrister-come-activist—now one of our most powerful judges—with strong and sustained party ties, making some of the most consequential decisions in British politics.
Bean has since been reported to the conduct authority for alleged “apparent bias”.
Unfortunately, neither can we exclude the judges who’ve held in the highest position of the land—our Lord Chief Justices.
Writing on Britain’s overcrowding prison crisis last September, five of the most senior surviving former judges—Lord Woolf, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, and Lord Burnett of Maldon, and Sir Brian Leveson—called for “radical solutions”.
One included the early release of killers and rapists on licence to ease prison overcrowding. Their intervention came four days before Labour released about 1,750 prisons early.
One of those prisoners, Amari Ward, allegedly sexually assaulted a woman on the same day he was freed.
Equally troubling, our current Lord Chief Justice, Baroness Sue Carr, has given us a glimpse of her beliefs of those who criticise the judiciary.
When Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch publicly condemned a judge for granting asylum to a Gazan family under a scheme specifically created for Ukrainians, Carr said the comments left her “deeply troubled” by the lack of respect for judicial independence.
So our democratically-elected MPs shouldn’t criticise potentially political judges now for fear of disrespect? This is the woman in charge of our judiciary, showing clear aversion to fair criticism.
Elsewhere, various Circuit and Crown Court Judges, who preside over some of the country’s most serious criminal cases and appeals, have purveyed in overt political outbursts.
We saw plenty during the Starmer-ordered fast-track prosecutions last year:
For instance, when sentencing 33-year-old plasterer Daniel Kingsley after he pleaded guilty to stirring up racial hatred, Judge Rhys Rowlands branded him a “bigot” in open court—not exactly suggestive of impartiality.
Kingsley had taken to Facebook in the aftermath of the Southport child murders. The worst of his posts? "If you are going to riot today do it properly." He deleted the post himself, apologised, and denied being a racist.
Reports did not show that Kingsley mentioned any specific race or nationality in his posts.
Then, there’s the infamous case of Judge Melbourne Inman KC, who saw fit to give political lectures during his sentencing remarks—something the likes of Zarah Sultana MP would proud be of.
He said to Lucy Connolly before sentencing her to 31 months, “it is strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive.”
Other examples include Judge Adrienne Lucking speculating that former IT worker and father-of-three Tyler Kay had a “fundamentally racist mindset” when sentencing him for X posts.
This was despite reports showing his posts, again, did not mention any race or nationality. Tyler likewise insisted he was not racist.
Seemingly political rulings have entered environmental cases too.
In the last few years, judges have repeatedly blocked oil and gas projects on the grounds of future carbon emissions, despite a long-established precedent that such “indirect” emissions fall under national policy, not the courts.
Across the board it’s clear, our laws are being bent in increasingly political ways by increasingly political judges.
So What’s the Real Problem?
We started noticing it at universities. Priorities changed, syllabuses were altered, and whole cohorts of the young population soon graduated with very pink hair and very progressive beliefs. Similar has occurred in the judiciary.
Even as Times authors have noted, “it is definitely true that the people who become migration judges tend to be migration lawyers—and that such lawyers generally got into the field to protect migrants’ rights, not borders”.
In other words, the judiciary too has been subject to a slow march.
The data on judicial voting is remarkably limited given their powers. But The Lawyer, a magazine thought to be read widely by UK lawyers, barristers, and judges, gives us some insight.
In June last year, it polled its readers on how they intended to vote for the 2024 General Election. The results? Over 53% of 888 respondents said they would cast their vote for Labour, compared to 18% for the Conservatives.
In an identical poll for the 2019 election, 40% of respondents said they planned to cast a vote for Liberal Democrats, then-headed by Jo Swinson, ahead of the Conservatives (26.5%) and Labour (18.9%).
Swinson banked her entire campaign on overturning the biggest democratic mandate Britain has ever seen—Brexit. She was also often heard lamenting the gender pay gap and the “climate crisis”.
It is also true that the judicial code of conduct has not been been properly policed by the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office (JCIO) and Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC).
The code states: “Office holders should, so far as is reasonable, avoid extra-judicial activities that are likely to cause them to have to refrain from sitting because of a reasonable apprehension of bias or because of a conflict of interest that would arise from the activity”.
It adds: “Judicial office holders must recuse themselves from any case where a fair-minded and informed observer, having considered the facts, would conclude that there was a real possibility that they would be biased.”
Given the severity and number of conflicts listed above, in what world could a “fair-minded and informed observer” not think there is a bias problem? Better yet, where are the rules outlawing conflicts altogether?
So what do you do when your judiciary is captured and its oversight mechanism neutered? You strip back its power. You limit judges’ ability to impose their biases. You return political decisions to elected hands.
May this be a stern lesson for other Western countries.
Do you believe our best days lie ahead?
Will you keep watching as our politicians and broadcasters push for yet more surveillance, censorship, and control?
If you want to push back—if not today, maybe someday—supporting independent journalism can (genuinely) make a real impact.
In the past year, The Stark Naked Brief reached over 120 million people on X. Sometimes, all it takes is one post—one uncomfortable truth—to wake someone up and put a dent the uniparty’s monopoly.
These progressive liberal judges will be the death of UK. They will someday learn to regret their decisions when harm comes to a family member or friend. If Britain doesn’t turn around their immigration policies soon, it will be too late if not already past. A country can only submit to this lunacy for so long before the immigrants take over completely or the British people stand up and revolt.
Do these judges ever order that anyone be deported?
While the cases described certainly appear to demonstrate egregious bias rather than objective assessment, it would be helpful to know if they are outliers (in which case we might assume there is more to them than the headlines suggest) or typical.
I would be reassured if I learned that these cases are 1% of those coming before these particular judges, with 99% cleared for immediate extradition. I suspect I won’t be reassured but we need some overall context.