Colombian dealer use human rights laws to stay in Scotland

A Colombian cocaine dealer attempting to use human rights laws to escape deportation from Scotland has been allowed to stay after a string of blunders by immigration officials.Home Secretary Theresa May was severely criticised by a Scottish judge after her department produced an error-strewn “cut and paste” legal case to have the convicted criminal thrown out of the country. This left the furious judge with no choice but to let the female dealer stay in Scotland. The woman, who plotted to flood the country with cocaine and crack cocaine and was jailed for 20 months in 2005, argued that being sent back to South America breached her right to a private life in Edinburgh. She even got legal aid to bring the case, funded by the taxpayer. Mrs May said the 48-year-old dealer’s claims were “clearly unfounded”, but the Home Secretary failed to convince Lord Bannatyne of this, and he quashed the deportation order, branding it “unlawful” and “unreasonable”. In his Court of Session ruling on Friday, he sent the case back to the Home Secretary for further consideration, saying there had been a “complete absence of anxious scrutiny”. One of the mistakes in the Home Office paperwork even called for the woman, identified only as AMP, to be sent back to Jamaica, not Colombia. Last night, the SNP Home Affairs spokesman, Pete Wishart MP, accused Mrs May of making “basic errors” and said he plans to raise the matter at Westminster. He added: “This is a shambles from the Home Office, and Theresa May must respond personally to the serious criticisms levelled by Lord Bannatyne.