A paedophile who led a child sex grooming ring in Rochdale tried - and failed - to overturn his convictions with a European court claiming an all-white jury was part of a conspiracy to scapegoat Muslims.

Shabir Ahmed wrote to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) claiming his convictions for child sex offences were part of anti-Islam witch hunt.

The 63-year-old attempted to use human rights laws to argue his criminal convictions were unsafe and unfair, but failed.

Ahmed is in Wakefield prison having being caged in 2012 and given a 19-year sentence.

European Court of Human Rights papers show he claimed the all-white jury at his trial was biased.

He desperately claimed that breached Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees a fair trial.

Ahmed claimed jury members passed information about their deliberations to far-right organisations hostile towards him and fellow defendants.

He argued that because former British National Party chief Nick Griffin posted that some defendants had been found guilty at the Liverpool Crown Court trial before verdicts had been returned, the jury could not have been impartial.

But Strasbourg judges unanimously threw the case out, saying there was ‘simply no proof’ jurors had done anything untoward.

They said the claim was ‘manifestly ill-founded’.

Judges added: “If it had been proven that a juror had passed confidential information on the jury deliberations to far-right organisations, this would suggest that the juror and the jury as a whole had lacked impartiality.

“However, there was simply no proof that that had happened. The impartiality of a jury must be presumed until there is proof to the contrary.”

Complaints of jury impartiality in the Liverpool crown court trial had previously been investigated by the UK’s criminal cases review commission and found to be without substance, the ECHR noted.

The ECHR said there were 12 safeguards to ensure the jury was unbiased.

(Image: Joel Goodman)

But Ahmed even claimed the case against him had been ‘tailored by police to fit anti-Muslim prejudice’.

He also cited a number of other human rights ‘violations’, which were dismissed.

Ahmed was described by a judge as a ‘violent hypocritical bully’ as he was jailed for 19 years in May 2012, after being convicted of ring-leading a group of Asian men who preyed on girls as young as 13 in Rochdale. The offenders plied their victims with drink and drugs before they were ‘passed around’ for sex.

He was later jailed for a further 22 years, to run concurrently, for 30 child rapes after a separate trial.

The court heard that he repeatedly raped a young girl for more than a decade, treating her as a ‘possession’ to use for his own sexual gratification.

Ahmed is also attempting to avoid being deported from Britain by claiming his human rights have been violated.