The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 (c. 4)[4] is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which makes significant changes in many areas of the criminal justice system in England and Wales and, to a lesser extent, in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

It also reduces the right of prison officers to take industrial action, and changed the law on the deportation of foreign criminals.

Section 35 extends the availability of referral orders (sentences designed to rehabilitate young offenders).

[7] Sections 13 to 17 restored a proportion of judicial discretion and imposed stricter criteria for the imposition of such sentences.

Section 21 introduces a new power enabling a court which imposes a custodial sentence to order that half of the time for which the defendant was on a curfew is to count as time served towards that sentence, provided that the curfew was in force for at least 9 hours each day and that it was monitored by a tag.

(This power only applies to offences committed on or after 4 April 2005, the last date on which major changes to sentencing were made.

Section 74 and Schedule 16 amend Part 3A of the Public Order Act 1986 to extend hate crime legislation to cover "hatred against a group of persons defined by reference to sexual orientation (whether towards persons of the same sex, the opposite sex or both)".

To prevent the Act being used to inhibit freedom of speech on the subject of homosexuality, paragraph 14 of Schedule 16 inserts a new section 29JA, entitled "Protection of freedom of expression (sexual orientation)" but sometimes known as the Waddington Amendment (after Lord Waddington who introduced it).

Section 79 abolished the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in England and Wales.

A conviction for murder under the law of a foreign country is also sufficient; this was added by section 119 of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, which came into force on 13 May 2014.

The defendant must be served with a notice giving the time and place of the hearing at which the application will be made.

When making this decision the court must take into account any other statutory measures that are in place to protect the public from the person.

If the order is made, the defendant may appeal to the Crown Court, which does not review the decision but decides the matter afresh for itself.

Section 26 brought forward the release date of prisoners serving sentences greater than 4 years imposed before 4 April 2005.

Section 54 creates a presumption that when an adult defendant fails to attend a magistrates' court for his trial or sentence, the hearing should continue without him.

The original version of this section, when the Act was still a bill, would have allowed them to prosecute imprisonable, indictable offences.

Section 76 codifies English and Northern Irish case law on the subject of self-defence.

The Secret Barrister described this as "an exercise of pure political conmanship", since politicians had pretended that they were strengthening the right of self-defence.

[14] The government told the public that in those circumstances, the new law meant that force need no longer be reasonable as long as it is not "grossly disproportionate".

However, in a 2016 court case[15] the government's lawyer successfully argued that this was not what the law really said, and that the primary test a jury would have to consider was still whether reasonable force had been used.

This permitted police and local authorities to apply for a court order to close for a period of three months residential premises associated with persistent noise and nuisance.

Section 119 created a new offence of causing "a nuisance or disturbance" to a member of staff of the National Health Service.

Designated foreign criminals have a special status under immigration law, and may be required to comply with conditions as to their residence, employment, and compulsory reporting to the police or a government office.