Two men who trafficked underage girls around Rochdale for sex are fighting deportation from the UK by invoking their human rights.
Adil Khan, 51, and Qari Abdul Rauf, 52, were members of a notorious grooming gang which gang-raped girls as young as 12 after plying them with alcohol and drugs.
They are contesting being sent back to Pakistan for their role in the sex abuse ring, whose reign of terror between 2008 and 2010 involved nealry 50 girls being groomed and abused.
Last month Khan denied the enormity of his offending, telling a preliminary hearing: ‘We have not committed that big a crime.’
At an immigration tribunal case management hearing on Thursday, he claimed to be ‘stateless’ after renouncing his Pakistani citizenship, with his lawyers believing it could prove a bar to deportation.
Both Khan and Rauf were among four of the gang’s nine men who were stripped of their British identities by then Home Secretary Theresa May, who launched deportation proceedings ‘for the public good’.
The failure to successfully deport them, almost a decade after their conviction, has fuelled huge anger in Rochdale, where victims were living alongside their tormentors.
Lawyers opposing the deportation proceedings say they violate Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – their right to a private and family life.
Sonali Naik QC, representing Rauf, said the Article 8 appeals of both men should be dealt with separately once Khan’s statelessness is resolved.
She said other similar cases have been dealt with individually in the past, ‘all the way to Strasbourg’, where the European Court of Human Rights sits.
But Cathryn McGahey QC, for the Home Office, argued the matters should be dealt with jointly as the background facts are the same.
Both Rauf’s and the government’s lawyers must now instruct experts in Pakistani law for the forthcoming appeal hearing on the issue of statelessness.
Police said as many as 47 girls were groomed by the gang, which was eventually brought to justice in 2012, when nine men were convicted of sex offences.
Khan was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2012 and released on licence four years later.
He got a 13-year-old girl pregnant but denied he was the father, then met another girl, 15, and trafficked her to others, using violence when she complained.
Rauf, a father-of-five, trafficked a 15-year-old girl for sex, driving her to secluded areas to have sex with her in his taxi and ferrying her to a flat in Rochdale where he and others abused her.
He was jailed for six years and released in November 2014 after serving two years and six months of his sentence.
Neither Rauf nor Khan were present for Thursday’s hearing. It has been adjourned until September.
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