This was never going to be a sympathetic deportation case. Visile Barbu killed Team GB triathlete Rebecca Comins in a June 2022 crash, was jailed after a five day trial, and then tried to turn the argument into one about family hardship. The immigration judge was having none of it.
That is the brutal reality here: when a fatal road death follows dangerous driving, the law does not treat the offender’s private life as some magic shield. Barbu’s appeal against deportation has now failed, and the message from the tribunal could not be much clearer.
A life in Britain was not enough to outweigh the offence
Barbu moved to Britain in 2002 to become a pub chef at Old Pandy public house and married Maria in 2004. But those years of settled life did not erase what happened on the A40 near Raglan, Monmouthshire, where Rebecca Comins was just nine minutes into a cycling time trial when Barbu hit her bike while delivering furniture to a driver in Calais.
Comins’ family described themselves as “so proud of what she achieved in her life”, and that matters because this case is not just about immigration paperwork. It is about the loss of a Team GB triathlete in circumstances that were found, after the trial, to amount to causing death by dangerous driving. The human cost is the whole point.
Immigration judge Ian Boyes put the issue in stark terms. “The nature of the offending is important. This was not an accident. It was not a slight misjudgement. It was committed using a vehicle which should not have been on the road.” That is not legal fluff. That is a direct repudiation of any attempt to dress up dangerous driving as an unfortunate lapse.
Boyes also said the children Barbu relied on were adults and did not depend on him, making it “not unduly harsh” to remove him. In plain English, the tribunal decided the family-life argument did not carry enough weight to overcome the very significant public interest in deportation.
The uncomfortable truth
Barbu wanted the court to accept that deportation would be “unduly harsh” for his “whole life”. But the judge’s answer was essentially that a long residence in Britain does not cancel out a killing on the road. It would be nice, from Barbu’s point of view, if the story ended with his domestic ties. It does not.
What this ruling underlines is that the system still has a line, and in cases like this it should. Rebecca Comins was not just another victim in an abstract legal file. She was a triathlete, a Team GB athlete, and a woman killed while doing her sport. The deportation decision reflects the fact that the offence, not the appellant’s convenience, is what carries the most weight.
For Barbu, the private case is over. For everyone else, the wider judgment is simple: if you kill someone through dangerous driving, Britain is under no obligation to keep you on its soil because you have spent years building a life here.
