It is a crime to promote child sex materials in England. However, one can overturn a sentence if they will claiming the move would harm his children.
The Indian criminal and convicted pedophile, who can only be referred to as "HS", claimed that deportation would hurt his right to "private and family life" under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
In 2021, he was jailed for 14 months on three counts of distributing child sex abuse images, was handed a sexual harm prevention order and required to sign the sex offenders’ register for 10 years.
However, when the Home Office tried to deport him, he successfully thwarted the bid by arguing it would breach his human rights, the Daily Mail reported. A new case is now pending following further appeals.
Tory leadership contender Robert Jenrick called the case "madness" and said it proved why Britain must leave the ECHR.
"We cannot even remove sick paedophiles from our streets because of spurious ECHR claims. How can anyone defend this madness?" he told the Daily Mail.
"We must put the safety of the British people first and leave the ECHR immediately."
First-tier immigration judge Jetsun Lebasci granted the appeal in August last year on the grounds it would be "unduly harsh" for HS’s two children to be separated from him.
The Home Office has since appealed the ruling. Appeal judges in the upper immigration and asylum tribunal also raised concerns about the way the earlier case was handled.
Home Office lawyers highlighted a report from an independent social worker, Laurence Chester, which found deportation would be too harsh on HS’s children. They raised a number of concerns about Chester’s report, noting he had not seen documents from the family court which outlined the measures other social workers and probation officers had imposed on HS in the wake of his sex offences.
These included family court judges preventing HS from having "direct unsupervised contact" with his children. Legal papers also found that HS has only weekly video calls with them.
"We find the independent social worker’s failure to consider the nature of the appellant’s offending... was an astonishing oversight," the upper court ruling said.
Tribunal judges Melissa Canavan and Matthew Hoffman also said: "By primarily relying on the evidence of the independent social worker, the judge failed to engage with the evident shortcomings of his report.
"We also find the judge failed to take into account the nature of the applicant’s offending, which involved child pornography, and how this factored into the issue of contact with his children."