Albanian drug dealer given asylum in Britain to protect HIS human rights faces new deportation hearing after LYING he was Serbian

Published 4 November 2026, 14:21

• Upper Tribunal Judge D. Blum found the earlier judge ignored Brikel Mataj's 'lengthy deception' about his nationality.
• The Home Office argued his Albanian wife and three young British-born children could simply join him in Albania.
• Mataj, jailed for 18 months in 2014 for intent to supply cannabis, now faces a fresh hearing before a new judge.

An Albanian drug dealer who lied about his nationality for more than a decade to win British citizenship has lost his bid to avoid deportation after a senior judge found the ruling that protected him was legally flawed.

Brikel Mataj arrived in the UK in 2000 falsely claiming to be Serbian.

Although his asylum claim was refused, he was granted indefinite leave to remain in 2008 and obtained British citizenship in 2013.

Checks by the British Embassy in Tirana in 2016 revealed the deception, and his citizenship was subsequently stripped.

In February 2014, he received an 18-month prison sentence after being found guilty of holding cannabis for the purpose of dealing.

The Home Office formally decided to deport him in January 2023, after his appeal against the loss of his citizenship was exhausted in July 2022.

Mataj's human rights appeal centred on his wife — also an Albanian national who entered the UK in November 2017 — and their three British-born children: a son aged nine and seven-year-old twins born in January 2019.

First-tier Tribunal judge Nixon ruled in January 2026 that deportation would be unduly harsh on the children, citing an Independent Social Worker report on the harm of separating them from their father and finding that remote communication "could not replicate physical contact."

Nixon also found that Mataj's family life, absence of further offending, good employment record and community ties outweighed the public interest in deporting the criminal.

Upper Tribunal Judge D. Blum overturned that decision, finding it contained two material legal errors.

The first concerned the question of whether the whole family could simply move to Albania together.

The Home Office's presenting officer at the original hearing had described that option as "unlikely to be a preferred option" — but Judge Blum found Nixon had wrongly read that as a formal concession that the Home Office was no longer pursuing it.

Both sides agreed at the Upper Tribunal that no such concession had been made.

Blum found Nixon had given "at best, a cursory view" of why relocating to Albania might be harsh, and had ignored factors pointing the other way — including the children's young ages, that their mother is Albanian, that Albanian is spoken at home, and that the family had previously visited relatives in Albania.

The second error was more damning.

At no point in Nixon's assessment, Judge Blum found, did the judge mention Mataj's "lengthy deception regarding his nationality," nor acknowledge that his "good employment" record — which Nixon counted in his favour — had only been possible because of that deception.

"The judge has therefore failed to undertake a lawful balancing exercise," Blum ruled.

Blum also rejected Nixon's finding that the Home Office had been guilty of "inordinate delay," accepting the Home Office's submission that there was in fact only a six-month gap between Mataj exhausting his appeal rights on 19 July 2022 and the deportation decision on 18 January 2023.

Mataj's counsel, Ms Rutherford, had argued that the children's British citizenship meant any failure to assess the relocation option could not have changed the outcome — an argument Blum rejected, finding the result was "not inevitable" either way.

The case has been sent back for a full fresh hearing before a different First-tier Tribunal judge, with all evidence to be assessed from scratch.