Ken Clarke last night admitted the Government had not completed a single prisoner transfer agreement to get rid of foreign criminals since coming to power 18 months ago.
Jails are crowded with overseas inmates, with officials struggling to deport them at the end of their sentence. But, despite claiming they would tackle the problem, the Justice Secretary said no other countries had agreed to take back their convicts since May last year. The only new deal in place is an EU-wide prisoner transfer agreement which comes into force next month.
Mr Clarke said there was only one case where negotiations were close to completing a deal. In a Commons question to the Justice Secretary, his Labour shadow Sadiq Khan said the new agreement with the EU – signed in 2007 under Labour – would make it impossible for a detainee's native country to refuse a request to take him back and the prisoner's consent for deportation would not be required.
Turning to Mr Clarke, Mr Khan added: 'The Prime Minister promised the repatriation of thousands of prisoners by personally taking charge of negotiations with individual countries. We all know he likes to keep his promises. Can you tell us how many new prisoner transfer agreements with individual countries have been successfully negotiated over the last 18 months? How many foreign prisoners do you expect to be repatriated this year?'
Mr Clarke replied: 'You hit on a very serious problem. We really do have to find some way of reducing the foreign prisoner population. 'We only at the moment have one international bi-lateral agreement that is near to coming to a conclusion but we are continuing to work on it because [foreign prisoners] take up 10 per cent of places in our prison system.'
"Hello, is that the justice minister for Kazakhstan? Ken Clarke, Justice Secretary from the UK here. We have 500 prisoners of yours in the UK. It’s the usual collection of murderers, rapists, illegal immigrants and ner-do-wells, ere, would you like to take them back please?"
"What do you think chummy? You have to be kidding!"
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
If their countries of origin won't take them back, what is he to do? Deposit them on those countries' soil anyway? (Not necessarily a bad idea.) Or what?
Reason is valuable only when it performs against the wordless physical background of the universe.
Ban them from ever entering the UK again, put them on a plane home, and let the other country sort them out.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
You can't put anyone on a plane unless they have appropriate travel documents to get them where they are going. That is no less true because they happen to be criminals. Otherwise, how many hundreds of thousands or millions of people would get on planes to the UK every year with no travel documents, and therefore no way to even determine where they should be sent back to once they land?
"Hang on while I log in to the James Webb telescope to search the known universe for who the fuck asked you." -- James Fell
These people have been determined to be foreign nationals, I'm assuming sufficient information on them exists to effect a transfer.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
