More than 1,300 foreign criminals have avoided being booted out of Britain because it would infringe their human rights.

Many who committed heinous offences, including killers, rapists and paedophiles, won permission to stay in the UK because their family live here, the latest figures show.

But the number of convicts who used the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to evade deportation has plummeted since a shake-up by the Home Office. Since Theresa May, when she was home secretary, introduced a ‘deport first, appeal later’ system for foreign criminals, those who won their human rights appeal fell from 356 in 2012/13 to just 11 last year.

Foreign criminals had been avoiding deportation by using the European Convention of Human Rights

Mrs May also introduced new rules spelling out to judges that Article 8 of the ECHR, which safeguards family life, was not ‘absolute’ after it was exploited by foreign criminals.

The number of foreign crooks using the ECHR, which was brought into UK law in 1998 by Labour’s controversial Human Rights Act, to avoid deportation rose every year from 2006/7 until its peak of 356 in 2012/13.

Former home secretary Theresa May (pictured), now Prime Minister, threw her weight behind calls for the Human Rights Act to be scrapped in 2011 and now foreign convicts who won their human rights appeal fell from 356 in 2012/13 to just 11 last year

This fell to 123 in 2013/14, 38 in 2014/15 and just 11 last year. The figures were disclosed in answer to a parliamentary question tabled by former Tory justice minister Dominic Raab.

Mr Raab said: ‘This data shows a dramatic reduction in criminals avoiding deportation since the Government’s reforms kicked in.’

Referring to the key Conservative general election pledge to bring in a new British Bill of Rights, he added: ‘By leaving the EU and replacing the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights we can build on this success, and restore some common sense to our skewed human rights laws.’

One of the most despicable cases was of Mustafa Abdullah, a Somalian who was jailed for ten years for raping a pregnant woman at knifepoint. Incredibly, immigration judges refused to approve his deportation, saying it would breach his right to a family life.

A Moroccan sex attacker who could only be identified as AB could also not be deported because of his family rights –even though his wife says he has left her and their children.

The 52-year-old illegal immigrant, who has cost the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds, run rings around the Home Office as he has evaded attempts to boot him out of Britain for 16 years.

Former Tory justice minister Dominic Raab (left) and Conservative MP Peter Bone (right) have praised the results of the reforms

Conservative MP Peter Bone said: ‘These people, who come here and commit crimes, should be deported. It is quite wrong they can claim their human rights were affected when they didn’t care about the human rights of the people they committed the crime against.

‘If you come to this country and commit a crime, you should serve your sentence and be deported. There shouldn’t be a European court telling our courts these people shouldn’t be deported.’

Britain is entitled to deport criminals from the European Union if they are sentenced to jail to serve their sentences in their homeland, while non-EU criminals must have served at least one year behind bars.

But there are 5,000-plus foreign offenders living in the community awaiting removal. Instead of being locked up until they are thrown out, they are freed to protect their ‘human rights’, and so could abscond or potentially put the public in danger. Nearly a third – 1,865 criminals – have been loose for more than five years.

The Home Office (pictured) said it removed a record 5,810 foreign national offenders in 2015/16

The Home Office said it removed a record 5,810 foreign national offenders in 2015/16. The number of appeals against deportation plunged from 2,351 in 2013/14 to 1,440 last year.

A Home Office spokesman said: ‘Any foreign national offender (FNO) who poses a threat to the UK should be in no doubt of our determination to deport them.