An illegal immigrant who was jailed for running a cannabis farm has been spared deportation back to his native Serbia because he has forgotten the language and would not be able to integrate.
Last month an immigration tribunal judge, Fiona Lindsley, allowed an appeal by Clirim Kukaj, 30, “on human rights grounds.”
Kukaj, an ethnic Albanian, was born and brought up in Serbia but came to the UK “clandestinely” in 2007, when he was 13 years old.
He made an asylum claim, which was refused, but he was granted discretionary leave to remain until June 2010, which was extended until April 2014, when he was granted indefinite leave to remain.
Jailed for 18 Months
The following month Kukaj pleaded guilty to being concerned in the production of cannabis and was jailed for 18 months at Cambridge Crown Court. He had claimed he had not planted them but was being paid cash to cultivate them.At the time, Detective Constable Josh Coe said, “Organised crime groups can generate large sums of money with little regard for those who are forced to produce the cannabis as well as the landlords who are left with severely damaged premises.”
Ged McCann, a senior NCA intelligence manager, said Albanian gangs were working with Iraqi Kurd people-trafficking syndicates and were “effectively bringing in the labour force for the cannabis grows.”
Mr. McCann said, “Many individuals that are arrested in cannabis grows arrived in the country a matter of days before on small boats.”
After Kukaj was released from prison, the Home Office sought to deport him back to Serbia.
He appealed up to the upper tribunal, which held a hearing on Dec. 5, with a ruling being handed down later last month.
Left School at 8 Over Bullying
Lawyers for Kukaj said he had dropped out of school in Serbia at the age of 8 after persistent bullying.Permission to appeal was granted in November 2023 on the basis that it was arguable Judge Loke had “erred in law in finding that the claimant no longer speaks Serbian without sufficient reasoning and failed to address a material matter namely given the claimant could speak Albanian whether this would be a useful local language which would assist his integration on return.”
Judge Lindsley said: “We find that the finding ... of the decision that the claimant no longer speaks Serbian is sufficiently reasoned, particularly as we find that it was entirely rationally open to the first-tier tribunal given that the claimant clearly comes from an ethnically Albanian and Albanian-speaking family and had ceased engaging with the Serbian language at school from the age of eight years.”
Although Kukaj is an ethnic Albanian, under English law he cannot be deported to Albania or neighbouring Kosovo—where Albanian is the official language—and could only be returned to Serbia, the country from which he arrived as a child.
