The British government is in court to stop the public seeing the full picture of migrant crime rates.
After the Information Commissioner ordered the Ministry of Justice to release nationality-linked conviction data from 2018 to 2024, officials have launched an appeal, claiming it risks identifying offenders and costs too much.
Campaigners say the real fear is what the numbers will show about open-border policies that have left British streets, transport and communities less safe.
‘Apparently in Britain we are not allowed to see it, and that’s appalling.’
— GB News (@GBNEWS) July 21, 2026
Crime and Justice Journalist David Shipley says the Government is blocking data on crime by type of offence and nationality because it doesn’t want Britons to know the harms of mass migration. pic.twitter.com/eqkZIXsMYF
The Centre for Migration Control submitted the Freedom of Information request that triggered the ruling. The MoJ rejected both the identification and cost arguments.
Director of Research Robert Bates called the legal fight “astonishing” and said it raises serious questions about what the government is hiding.
Research Director at the Centre for Migration Control, Rob Bates, accuses the Government of 'launching an attack on transparency and accountability', as they enter a legal battle to block the publication of data on migrant convictions by nationality. pic.twitter.com/dVoK4sdQIn
— GB News (@GBNEWS) July 21, 2026
The publication of migrant crime data matters. A lot.
— Centre for Migration Control (@migrationCtrl) July 22, 2026
"If certain nationalities commit crime at a greater rate than others, knowing this would allow us to adjust our visa policy accordingly and, when appropriate, introduce blanket bans on immigration from certain countries." https://t.co/E7bqIApDLw
Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick put it bluntly: “The cover-up continues. Successive Tory and Labour justice secretaries have refused to publish this basic information. A Reform government led by Nigel Farage would immediately blow the lid on what’s really happening and begin deporting these dangerous criminals.”
'The public deserve to know.'
— GB News (@GBNEWS) July 21, 2026
Deputy Online Editor at The Critic, Tom Jones relays some of the figures on migrant crime that the Government are entering a legal battle to try and conceal. pic.twitter.com/xXtiAel7Qz
A Ministry of Justice spokesman insisted there is no cover-up but declined further comment while proceedings continue.
Partial data already released shows foreign nationals accounted for 14.1 per cent of sex offence convictions in 2025. That figure excludes naturalised British citizens and lacks breakdowns for rape, grooming or child sexual abuse.
Earlier analysis comparing prison rolls to census figures found foreigners overall 27 per cent more likely to be imprisoned than British citizens.
Albanians recorded an imprisonment rate of 232.33 per 10,000 people against 14 for British citizens. Kosovars, Vietnamese, Algerians, Jamaicans, Eritreans, Iraqis and Somalis all sat well above the British baseline. Some groups, including Germans, Italians and Indians, sat below it.
Those patterns match the detailed pictures already forced into the open through earlier FOI work.
Foreign nationals made up 79 per cent of theft arrests on British trains in 2025, 40 per cent of drug offence arrests, 37 per cent of sexual offence arrests and 36 per cent of violent crime arrests.
They accounted for nearly 3,700 of the 9,771 total arrests recorded by British Transport Police that year.
Across England and Wales, foreign nationals were arrested 172,889 times in the year ending March 2025 — one every 183 seconds — including 51,212 for violence and 11,264 for sexual offences.
Separate figures showed foreign nationals 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for sex crimes than British citizens, with an arrest rate of nearly 165 per 100,000 against 48 per 100,000 for Britons.
They formed 26.1 per cent of sexual offence arrests despite comprising around 9 per cent of the population.
In the City of London the foreign share of sex crime arrests reached 66.9 per cent; in Derbyshire it hit 44.8 per cent. Nationalities with the highest rates included Afghans, Iraqis, Algerians and Somalis.
The two-tier reality of enforcement has also become impossible to ignore. An Ethiopian small-boat arrival housed in an Epping asylum hotel sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl and a woman who tried to help him.
He received a 12-month sentence. Local residents who protested the hotel and the offender later received longer jail terms.
One father of two was given two years and nine months for violent disorder after adopting what a judge called a “fighting or boxing stance.”
Police Scotland has gone further, refusing FOI requests for aggregated data on call-outs, crimes and arrests at five asylum hotels.
Officers cited fears that releasing the figures would heighten community tensions and put people at risk of physical harm. The force acknowledged the hotels house asylum seekers and refugees yet argued that numbers could change over time and that incidents might be linked to protests rather than residents.
Scottish Conservative shadow justice secretary Liam Kerr called the refusal another example of public bodies following an SNP culture of secrecy.
The same pattern repeats across Europe. In Spain a CEU-CEFAS study found foreigners commit five times more rapes and four times more murders per capita than Spanish citizens.
They make up 31 per cent of the prison population. In Catalonia 91 per cent of convicted rapists are migrants, who form only 17 per cent of the population.
Penetrative rape cases rose 143 per cent between 2019 and 2024. Attempted murders nearly doubled over a similar period. Illegal property occupations saw foreigners accounting for 51.8 per cent of arrests.
Official Spanish figures show rape crimes tripled from 1,878 cases in 2019 to 5,206 in 2024 — an average of 14 rapes per day. Catalonia, Madrid and Andalusia led the surge. Sixty-four per cent of sexual assault and rape inmates are foreign nationals.
Eurostat data confirmed the continental scale: rape reports in Spain surged 322 per cent over the last decade, against an EU average rise of 150 per cent.
EU-wide sexual violence cases exceeded 250,000 in 2024, with nearly 100,000 rapes. Foreigners in Spain remain over-represented in serious crime even as the native population ages.
In France left-wing MPs, including Greens, tabled an amendment demanding public media reduce coverage of crime stories. They cited the murders of 13-year-old Lola and of Thomas in Crépol as examples of “political exploitation” by the right.
Marine Le Pen called the move a hallmark of totalitarian ideology that threatens the public’s right to know. French statistics already show foreigners responsible for 69 per cent of violence and sexual crimes on public transport, half of all crimes in Paris and 55 per cent in Marseille.
Germany’s 2025 police crime statistics show foreigners, 15 per cent of the population, responsible for 41 per cent of violent crimes and 38 per cent of murders.
They account for 39.1 per cent of serious sexual offences. Rape has risen 72 per cent since 2018. Afghans are 14 times more likely than Germans to commit sexual offences; Syrians are 11 times more likely to commit violence.
Knife crime runs at 29,000 incidents a year. In North Rhine-Westphalia foreigners commit 48 per cent of robberies.
Reported rapes in Germany reached nearly 14,000 in 2025, a 9 per cent rise on the previous year and a 72 per cent jump since 2018. Non-German nationals formed around 41 per cent of suspects for crimes against sexual self-determination.
In some states the over-representation reaches three to four times their population share. Hesse’s Interior Minister Roman Poseck noted that perpetrators with a migration background are overrepresented and that some arrive with “a completely wrong understanding of roles” regarding women’s rights.
Sweden Democrats MEP Charlie Weimers forced the European Parliament to confront the pattern after a Swedish police officer was beaten to death at a Copenhagen fan zone and a Gambian migrant in Milan stabbed a man 20 times “for fun.”
Weimers described the attacks as part of a broader wave undermining ordinary Europeans’ safety. Swedish Social Democrats voted against even holding the debate.
The refusal to publish the data sits against a starker warning delivered inside the same parliament.
At a conference titled “Civil War: Europe at Risk?”, Professor David Betz of King’s College London told MEPs that “Europe is on track for civil war.”
Marion Maréchal warned that cultural homogeneity — the main basis of trust between citizens — is eroding, producing societies of violence and mistrust.
A report mapped up to a thousand no-go zones across the continent. Betz described the trajectory as Balkanisation that could extinguish coherent national identities and lead to large-scale conflict resembling the Troubles or the Years of Lead, only on a continental scale.
British officials still claim the full nationality breakdown is too expensive or too risky to release. The Information Commissioner already rejected those arguments.
Campaigners note that partial data and FOI-driven releases have already painted a consistent picture: certain nationalities drive disproportionate shares of theft, violence and sexual crime, while native protesters face longer sentences than the offenders who provoked them.
Across Spain, France and Germany the same disparities appear, often followed by official efforts to limit public discussion rather than confront the numbers.
The legal battle is therefore not about administrative cost. It is about whether British voters are allowed to see the consequences of the migration policies successive governments have pursued.
Reform UK has pledged to publish the data and begin deportations. Until then, the Ministry of Justice will keep fighting in the courts to keep the full ledger closed.
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