A judge has granted a convicted murderer from Uganda his appeal not to be deported back home. The appeal was granted after his lawyers argued that it would be “inhumane” to send the 37-year-old, who suffers from a psychiatric disorder, back to his home country.
While British news reports referred to the killer only by his initials, reports from the BBC archives show that the Ugandan national in question is Zak Mayanja.
In 2005, Mayanja was part of a gang who chased down and clubbed Eugen Breahna to death with baseball bats and golf clubs after the victim had sought refuge in the back of a nearby ambulance. Mayanja committed the atrocious crime along with six of his fellow gang members, who were largely of Romanian origin.
Although he was handed a life sentence at the Central Criminal Court in 2006 and was subject to deportation back to Uganda upon his release, Mayanja appealed the decision at a tribunal in Nottingham last year.
During the legal proceedings, Mayanja’s attorneys argued it would be “inhumane” to send Mayanja back to Uganda because he may not have access to the psychiatric treatment he needs.
They also told the court that Mayanja’s disorder caused him “to suffer a pervasive distrust and suspiciousness” that led him to obsess over conflicts with people he believed caused him harm.
Although the ruling was challenged by the Home Office, which argued that the killer’s lawyers “did not have knowledge of psychiatric facilities in Uganda,” a judge ruled that the information provided by the tribunal was “adequately reasoned” and deporting Mayanja would violate his human rights.
“I find that if the appellant was removed to Uganda, there would be serious, rapid and irreversible decline in their state of health resulting in intense suffering or significant reduction in life expectancy,” explained the judge.
“All of those factors lead me to conclude that there is a real risk of ill-treatment, capable of breaching [his] Article 3 rights, in the context of reception procedures in Uganda.”
In the United Kingdom, individuals are protected by the Human Rights Act 1998. Article 3 of the Act grants individuals “the right not to be tortured or treated in an inhuman or degrading way.”
This is not the first time in recent news that a migrant engaged in criminal activity has avoided deportation. As previously reported by The Publica, a migrant from Afghanistan accused of raping three women in Sweden avoided deportation as he was granted citizenship just before he was detained.
The suspect, who moved from Afghanistan as an unaccompanied minor when he was 16 years old, carried out his attack against his first two victims in December of 2021 at the hospital where he worked.
According to Hospital Human Resources Chief Olivia Laurent Wijkmark, the migrant’s role involved watching over vulnerable patients who “require supervision.”
Although the migrant is said to have no previous criminal history, police placed the asylum seeker in custody last weekend under suspicion he had raped a third victim at a residential address in Uppsala last month.
Despite the Västmanland District Court confirming in a remand order that “there are probable grounds to suspect the 24-year-old of three rapes,” the migrant was granted Swedish citizenship last May and can not be deported.
