Pakistani-British Liberal Democrat Qurban Hussain admitted he illegally smuggled a two-year-old boy into the UK by claiming he was his son.
Lord Hussain, who was made a life peer as Baron Hussain, lied to the British High Commission in Islamabad about the child’s true parentage after his poverty-stricken Kashmiri parents begged his wife to adopt the boy, according to the Daily Mail.
The Sunday Mirror revealed Lord Hussain told officials the boy, who was born in Pakistan in 1990, had the right to British citizenship as he was the father.
“I know now it is illegal. I realise it was legally wrong but morally it was the right thing to do,” he told the Mirror.
The boy, now 23, was flown to the UK at the age of two and given a British passport soon after.
“The child’s mother begged my wife to take him. You have never seen levels of poverty like this family lived in.”
He added his ‘son’ is a university graduate and he and his wife are ‘very proud’ of him.
Lord Hussain, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s diversity adviser, said he and his wife had ‘adopted’ the child to save him from a life of poverty, but had never filed the correct paperwork.
Ironically, Lord Hussain’s first act in Parliament was to discuss immigration and the risks of breaching immigration law.
The 58-year-old from Luton will now be investigated by the police under the 1971 Immigration Act.
A Liberal Democrat spokesman said the party is looking into the matter.
As per rules, peers can be suspended but not excluded from the House of Lords unless they have a conviction for an offence that carries a jail sentence of a year or more.
Lord Hussain became a prominent figure in the Liberal Democrats after Clegg approached him to represent the party in the Upper House and was made a life peer in January 2011.
The deputy prime minister recently vowed to remain tough on immigration after dramatically admitting he was wrong to offer amnesty to illegal immigrants in 2013.