Two senior immigration judges face a disciplinary investigation and could lose their jobs after a Brazilian cleaner made allegations at the Old Bailey criminal court in London about their drug and sex-fueled private lives.
The cleaner, Roselane Driza, 37, faces jail and deportation after being convicted yesterday on Wednesday of blackmailing one of the judges, a woman known as Judge J, and stealing two sex videos from the second, Mohammed Ilyas Khan.
The recorder of London, Judge Peter Beaumont, yesterday lifted an order banning the identification of Khan, after Driza was acquitted of a blackmail charge against him. The recorder said the anonymity normally given to alleged victims of blackmail could be lifted because the allegations about him went beyond his private life and touched on his public role.
Khan is a barrister who sits as a part-time judge in the criminal courts as well as being a senior immigration official.
After the verdicts the Department for Constitutional Affairs said it was considering a disciplinary inquiry.
"The lord chancellor and the lord chief justice believe that the public must have confidence in judges and take any allegations against them very seriously,'' a spokesman said.
During one of the first blackmail trials for years at the Old Bailey, Driza revealed intimate details of Judge J's relationship with Khan and with another immigration judge known as Mr N. She claimed Judge J and Khan knew she was in Britain illegally when they employed her as a cleaner. The judges deny this.
Driza was found guilty of making a ?20,000 (US$37,600) blackmail demand to Judge J after being sacked as her cleaner in 2004. She threatened in letters to Judge J to tell the prime minister, the Department for Constitutional Affairs and the lord chancellor that she had been employed illegally.
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