1. Mr Alex Goodman moves for the discharge from custody of SK. He asserts on behalf of the prisoner that he has been unlawfully detained by the Secretary of State for the Home Department for the best part of twenty-two months. I agree that SK has indeed been unlawfully detained for substantial periods. But he is at present lawfully detained. SK is accordingly entitled to damages for false imprisonment in the past but he is not entitled to be released.

   2. I must return to this in due course but I have to say that the melancholy facts that have been exposed as a result of these proceedings are both shocking and scandalous. They are shocking even to those who still live in the shadow of the damning admission by a former Secretary of State that a great Department of State is 'unfit for purpose'. They are scandalous for what they expose as the seeming inability of that Department to comply not merely with the law but with the very rule of law itself.

   3. None of this can in any way be extenuated – and very properly Mr Martin Chamberlain, who had the unenviable task of representing the Secretary of State, did not for a moment suggest otherwise – by the fact that SK is a foreign national, a convicted sex offender (the reason why he is being deported) and a failed asylum seeker whose claim to the protection of the Geneva Convention was properly found by the Secretary of State, upheld by an Immigration Judge on appeal, to be false.

   4. SK will evoke sympathy in few hearts but everyone is protected by the law, by the rule of law. It matters not what a person has done. Outlawry has long been abolished. As Lord Scarman said in R v Secretary of State for the Home Department ex p Khawaja [1984] AC 74 at page 111:

          "Every person within the jurisdiction enjoys the equal protection of our laws. There is no distinction between British nationals and others. He who is subject to English law is entitled to its protection. This principle has been in the law at least since Lord Mansfield freed "the black" in Sommersett's Case (1772) 20 StTr 1."

 

The judgement