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Two Pakistani students tried to win their battle to stay in the UK by each marrying a woman in Britain with learning disabilities, courts have been told.

Judges in the separate cases have ruled that the women did not have the mental capacity to consent to marriage.

One of the students, who is in his 20s, wed a vulnerable woman in her late teens. The relationship began two months after he exhausted his rights of appeal to stay in Britain.

The second man married a woman in her 30s six weeks after his application to remain was refused following his two-year student visa expiring.

An informant told officials that the woman’s stepdad was paid £20,000 “in consideration” of the marriage.

The judge in this case, Mrs Justice Parker, said “a Muslim marriage, not recognised in this jurisdiction, was performed” in 2011. The woman became pregnant and gave birth in 2012.

Mrs Justice Parker said: “He [the man] is now relying on his marriage and fatherhood... in support of his claim to remain. So, the reality is whatever his original motivation, [the woman] is being used.”

The judge ruled that the woman lacked “sufficient understanding” to agree to marriage, and did not have the mental capacity to consent to sex. Mrs Justice Parker said immigration proceedings involving the man, who is in his 30s, have not yet been resolved.

In the other case, the judge Mr Justice Keehan said that days after the wedding at the student’s home in 2012, the man claimed asylum as “he feared he would be killed by his family who disapproved of his marriage to a white British woman”.

The man was deported in 2012.

Councils asked the judges – both sitting in the Court of Protection at the High Court in Central London – to decide if the women had been fit to agree to wed. No one was named.

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