An immigration judge behind a series of controversial rulings has contributed dozens of articles to an ‘open borders’ website.
Judge Sarah Pinder regularly wrote for the publication Free Movement, including a piece in which she described immigration detention centres as ‘abhorrent’.
The articles date from 2011 to 2022 – with the most recent published three years after she was appointed as a part-time immigration judge in 2019. Judge Pinder was promoted to the upper immigration tribunal last June.
Free Movement also briefs immigration advisers on how to make successful applications to the Home Office on behalf of their clients, and offers tips on case law which may help them win at appeal.
Judge Pinder’s rulings in the immigration tribunal include allowing a paedophile from Zimbabwe to stay in Britain because he could face ‘hostility’ in his homeland.
She was also one of two judges who ruled a Sudanese asylum seeker was a child despite the Home Office arguing that he was at least 23, with a receding hairline, the Telegraph reported.
The judge, who was previously an immigration barrister at Goldsmith Chambers, also allowed a Jamaican drug dealer to remain in the UK after being told he had a transgender child.
A group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, from a Border Force vessel, on February 15
Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick said judges are trusted to ‘park their political beliefs at the door’
The case heard the repeat offender could not be deported because his daughter was ‘experiencing issues with her gender identity, which she had only been able to discuss with her father’.
Judge Pinder dismissed an appeal by the Government and ruled the criminal’s children would have ‘unmet emotional needs’ and that it would be ‘unduly harsh’ on them if he was deported. Tory justice spokesman Robert Jenrick said: ‘Judges are trusted to park their political beliefs at the door.
‘But when a judge’s open borders political views seamlessly overlap with their expansionist judicial decisions, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that they have been compromised.’
Greg Smith, Conservative MP for Mid Buckinghamshire, said: ‘The public expect our judiciary to be independent, not peddling their own agenda. There is no excuse for judicial activism, and any identified activism like this must be stamped out.’
