A foreign criminal with an "abysmal" history of offending has won £40,000 damages at the High Court over a period of "unlawful" immigration detention while attempts were made to deport him.
The award against the Home Secretary was made to Moroccan national Khalid Belfken, 27, who has been the subject of a deportation order since February 2008.
Allowing a judicial review challenge by Belfken, Karen Steyn QC, sitting as a deputy High Court judge in London, said he had been unlawfully detained from July 12 2016 to May 3 this year.
She announced in a ruling on Wednesday: "The Secretary of State is liable to pay the claimant damages in the sum of £40,000."
The judge declared: "I should emphasise that, although it has not yet proved possible to deport the claimant, he remains liable to deportation."
Belfken, who claimed asylum after arriving in the UK in 2005 at the age of 15, has committed offences including burglary, theft, criminal damage, assaulting a police officer, possession of an offensive weapon in a public place, and possession of cannabis.
His High Court claim centred on his fourth period of detention under immigration powers - he has previously won damages over an earlier unlawful period during 2013.
The Home Secretary conceded that part of the most recent detention was unlawful because throughout the period from September 7 2016 to May 3 2017 there was no realistic prospect of his removal from the UK within a reasonable period.
In her ruling the judge said: "The claimant has an abysmal offending history, and a long record of failure to comply with the conditions on which he has been released.
"There can be no doubt that the risks of him re-offending and absconding, on release, were extremely high.
"Although his convictions were not for offences at the very gravest end of the spectrum, they were serious and the gravity of his offending had been increasing.
"He was rightly assessed, in July 2016, as presenting a high risk of harm to the public."
The judge said she accepted the Secretary of State's contention that Belfken had not been co-operative and "more than that, has been actively obstructive of her efforts to secure his removal".
The only barrier to Belfken's removal has been his lack of travel documentation.
Since May 2008, a number of applications to the Moroccan embassy for an emergency travel document (ETD) have been refused.
The judge ruled that the Home Secretary had failed to establish that there was any realistic prospect of the Moroccan authorities providing Belfken with the document "so as to enable his removal within a reasonable period".
The judge said: "The claimant has no lawful right to remain in the United Kingdom and he should leave.
"As he has not left voluntarily, it is strongly in the public interest that the Secretary of State should deport him, if possible."
The reasonable period "for which the Secretary of State could lawfully detain the claimant, if there were a realistic prospect of removing him during that period, would be relatively long".
She said: "Nevertheless, the right to liberty is of fundamental importance.
"It should be recalled that before this fourth period of immigration detention began on July 12 2016, the claimant had already been subjected to administrative detention for a total of four years and two months, since February 2008."
Pointing out that he was still liable to removal from the UK, she said: "Efforts to obtain better evidence demonstrating his Moroccan nationality do not have to cease because he is not held in immigration detention."
She added: "The fact that there was not, in my view, any realistic prospect of removing the claimant during his most recent period of immigration detention does not mean that such a prospect may not arise again in the future."