"The deportation of foreign-national offenders (FNOs) who are convicted of Islamist-related terrorism offences remains one of the leading domestic security concerns in the UK," the HJS said in a report that charts the evolution of the problem of terrorism deportations over the last 20 years.
According to the report, at the heart of the debate is the UK government´s "deportation with assurance" policy, which prevents deporting foreigners when there is a risk of torture in the receiving country.
It focused in particular on cases of 45 terrorists who have managed to remain in the UK after serving prison sentences for Islamist terrorism-related offenses.
The HSJ also cited the case of Libyan citizen Khairi Saadallah, who on Monday was handed a whole-life prison sentence for the June 2020 terrorist attack in Reading, England, in which he stabbed three people to death and injured another three.
The 26-year-old was previously convicted on six separate occasions for a total of eleven crimes between June 2015 and January 2020, and although eligible for deportation, he was not sent back to his country of origin because of human rights concerns.
"The case of Khairi Saadallah, among others, strikes at the core of domestic security debates in contemporary civil discourse – the apparent trade-off between human rights protection for foreign-national criminals and the broader collective security of the British public," the report said.
Among the recommendations made by the neoconservative think tank are that the government should redefine "more tightly" the meaning of inhuman and degrading treatments in the Human Rights Act, help developing counties build justice facilities compatible with deportations from the UK and create an Asylum Review Taskforce.
It also advocated for the automatic deportation of any foreign national convicted of racially or religiously motivated offenses in the UK.
