Deportation recommendations (FOI)

Request

Please advise how many people both the Magistrate's Court and Royal Court have recommended for Deportation over the past 20 years, and how many people have actually been deported following those recommendations?

Response

A Court may make a recommendation for deportation at the time of judgment, but any decision to deport is based on the facts at the time when that decision is considered, which is only after any sentence of the Court is complete. Therefore there is no relationship between the number of recommendations for deportation by the Courts over a particular period and the number of deportations over the same period. While the Court makes a recommendation for deportation, the decision whether the deportation takes place was historically made by the Lieutenant-Governor. As of 10 November 2017, when the Immigration (Jersey) (Amendment) Order 2017 came into force, the decision maker for deportations is the Minister for Home Affairs.

All Court judgments including a recommendation for deportation are publicly available on the Jersey Legal Information Board website www.jerseylaw.je and may be searched so as to determine how many recommendations for deportation are made in any particular period. This information, being publicly available, is therefore absolutely exempt information under Article 23 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011.

In searching our records covering the point in time at which a Court recommendation for deportation is reviewed and acted upon we have found relevant information for the 16 years 2001 to 2016. This information is provided in the table below. This shows over the 16 years 149 recommendations for deportation by the courts, of which five were not deported.

Article Applied

Article 23 Information accessible to applicant by other means

(1) Information is absolutely exempt information if it is reasonably available to the applicant, otherwise than under this Law, whether or not free of charge.

(2) A scheduled public authority that refuses an application for information on this ground must make reasonable efforts to inform the applicant where the applicant may obtain the information.