Illegal Immigrant With Cannabis Farming Conviction Wins Appeal After Forgetting How to Speak Serbian

An undated image of Clirim Kukaj, who was jailed for growing cannabis in Cambridgeshire, England, in June 2020. Cambridgeshire Constabulary

An illegal immigrant who was jailed for running a cannabis farm has been spared deportation back to his native Serbia because he has forgotten the language and would not be able to integrate.

Last month an immigration tribunal judge, Fiona Lindsley, allowed an appeal by Clirim Kukaj, 30, “on human rights grounds.”

Kukaj, an ethnic Albanian, was born and brought up in Serbia but came to the UK “clandestinely” in 2007, when he was 13 years old.

He made an asylum claim, which was refused, but he was granted discretionary leave to remain until June 2010, which was extended until April 2014, when he was granted indefinite leave to remain.

But six years later police raided a house in Hardwick, near Cambridge, and discovered 580 cannabis plants worth up to £487,000.

Jailed for 18 Months

The following month Kukaj pleaded guilty to being concerned in the production of cannabis and was jailed for 18 months at Cambridge Crown Court. He had claimed he had not planted them but was being paid cash to cultivate them.

At the time, Detective Constable Josh Coe said, “Organised crime groups can generate large sums of money with little regard for those who are forced to produce the cannabis as well as the landlords who are left with severely damaged premises.”

In November 2022 the National Crime Agency said illegal immigrants from Albania were being put to work in cannabis farms by organised crime gangs.

Ged McCann, a senior NCA intelligence manager, said Albanian gangs were working with Iraqi Kurd people-trafficking syndicates and were “effectively bringing in the labour force for the cannabis grows.”

Mr. McCann said, “Many individuals that are arrested in cannabis grows arrived in the country a matter of days before on small boats.”

After Kukaj was released from prison, the Home Office sought to deport him back to Serbia.

He appealed up to the upper tribunal, which held a hearing on Dec. 5, with a ruling being handed down later last month.

Documents from the hearing showed the then-home secretary, Priti Patel, had sent Kukaj a letter in August 2020 ordering his deportation but he replied by making a human rights claim.

The home secretary rejected this on Feb. 12, 2021, but Kukaj appealed to the first-tier tribunal and in August 2022 Judge Siew Ying Loke ruled in his favour.

Left School at 8 Over Bullying

Lawyers for Kukaj said he had dropped out of school in Serbia at the age of 8 after persistent bullying.

Permission to appeal was granted in November 2023 on the basis that it was arguable Judge Loke had “erred in law in finding that the claimant no longer speaks Serbian without sufficient reasoning and failed to address a material matter namely given the claimant could speak Albanian whether this would be a useful local language which would assist his integration on return.”

Judge Lindsley said: “We find that the finding ... of the decision that the claimant no longer speaks Serbian is sufficiently reasoned, particularly as we find that it was entirely rationally open to the first-tier tribunal given that the claimant clearly comes from an ethnically Albanian and Albanian-speaking family and had ceased engaging with the Serbian language at school from the age of eight years.”

Although Kukaj is an ethnic Albanian, under English law he cannot be deported to Albania or neighbouring Kosovo—where Albanian is the official language—and could only be returned to Serbia, the country from which he arrived as a child.

A Home Office spokesperson told The Telegraph: “Any foreign national who is convicted of a crime and given a prison sentence is considered for deportation at the earliest opportunity. It is longstanding government policy that we do not routinely comment on individual cases.”