A 40-year-old Nigerian national known as OSB is set to be deported from the United Kingdom following a ten-year legal battle. The man was originally convicted at Southwark Crown Court in 2009 for multiple attempted rapes and kidnapping.

A decade-long struggle between public safety and Article 3 protections

This legal battle reflects a growing tension in UK immigration law between the enforcement of deportation orders and the protections afforded by the European Convention on Human Rights. For years,the intersection of mental health and Article 3 has created significant hurdles for the Home Office when attempting to remove individuals with chronic conditions.

The Home Office first issued a deportation order for OSB in February 2017, but the process was stalled by a series of appeals and asylum claims. According to the report, the man's legal team utilized human rights arguments to prevent his removal, despite his history of violent behavior. In 2009, the Southwark Crown Court heard how OSB attacked a 16-year-old girl in an alleyway and later assaulted a second woman who was forced to defend herself with a glass bottle.

The threat to public safety remained a central concern throughout the decade of litigation. In 2023, OSB was returned to a hospital after an incident involving a knife at his supported accommodation. This incident occurred despite medical evidence indicating that his paranoid schizophrenia remained a "serious danger" to the public, as noted in a mental health tribunal.

The "impermissibly speculative" defense regarding Nigerian prisons

Lawyers for OSB argued that his deportation would violate Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits inhuman or degrading treatment. They claimed that if the Nigerian national were sent home, he might stop taking his medication, suffer a relapse, and eventually be imprisoned in Nigeria without adequate psychiatric care. the first-tier judge had previously accepted this "high risk" scenario, suggesting it could lead to an irreversible decline in his mental health.

The report notes that upper tier judges had also backed these findings, calling them "detailed, balanced and carefully reasoned." This legal strategy effectively kept the convicted offender in the UK for almost ten years after the initial order was made, as the courts weighed the potential for future suffering against the mandate for deportation.

Lord Justice Bean's rejection of "too many links in the chain"

The Court of Appeal has now overturned these previous rulings, with Lord Justice Bean describing the earlier legal reasoning as "impermissibly speculative." The court found that the sequence of events proposed by the defense—ranging from medication non-compliance to imprisonment in Nigeria—was too remote to hold the UK responsible. Lord Justice Bean stated that it is not a sequence of events for which the UK can sensibly be held responsible.

Sitting alongside Lord Justice Singh and Lord Justice Baker, the court found that the lower tribunals had failed to meet the necessary legal threshold of "intense suffering." The judges concluded that the UK cannot be held liable for a chain of events that occurs entirely outside its borders after a person has been deported. Lord Justice Bean emphasized that nearly ten years after the original order, it was time to put the deportation into effect.

The missing details on Nigerian psychiatric support

While the Court of Appeal has cleared the path for deportation, several claims made by OSB's legal team remain unverified.. It is not yet confirmed whether the Nigerian medical system can provide the specific psychiatric care required to prevent a relapse of his paranoid schizophrenia. Additionally, the Home Office has not addressed whether the potential for OSB to end up in a Nigerian prison without medication is a factual certainty or, as the court suggested, merely a speculative sequence of events.