Hundreds of foreign national prisoners are being held indefinitely, sometimes for years, when they can’t be removed from the country. With no time limit on immigration detention powers, judges and the Home Office are operating within what one lawyer described to me as ‘a culture of indeterminate detention.’ It’s a...
The Upper Tribunal has finally referred the vexed question of the rights of ‘other family members’ (or ‘extended family members’ in the domestic EEA regulations) to the European Court of Justice. The reference was made by Mr Justice Blake, the President of the Immigration and Asylum Chamber. The questions are...
The date has finally been announced for transfer of fresh claim judicial reviews into the Upper Tribunal: 1 October 2011. This has been coming for some time and seems to have been held up by some confusion over the effect of BA (Nigeria). Section 53 of the Borders, Citizenship and...
There have been a number of interesting announcements by UKBA today, which I will add to the blog once I’ve had time to digest and consider. Most of them surround child detention and what is now being termed the ‘family returns process’. The first I’ll cover is a discrete issue,...
This is a problem that has been addressed previously on the blog: what can be done when a person makes an immigration application but for technical legal reasons is not granted a right of appeal to the tribunal? See this previous post. The problem has now been addressed in two...
[UPDATE: see more recent post] Remarkable: “The UK Border Agency is aware that the visas of some Libyans may expire before they are able to leave the UK, due to the current situation in Libya. Travellers transiting through Libya to other countries may also be affected. The agency appreciates that...
The Home Office have published the results of a survey on the Points Based System (full report, summary, both as pdfs). It makes interesting reading. Well, I say “interesting”, I actually mean “terribly dull unless you are freakishly interested in such things”. Like me. The report does not address Tier...
This is stomach turning stuff, I’m afraid, and has left me quivering with anger. A new case on Article 3 has just been reported: GS (Article 3 – health exceptionality) India [2011] UKUT 35 (IAC) The facts of the case and the medical evidence were undisputed. That evidence was as...
An important case from late last year has so far escaped comment here on Free Movement but deserves special mention: MH (pending family proceedings – discretionary leave) Morocco [2010] UKUT 439 (IAC) (28 September 2010). In it, the Upper Tribunal confirmed the currency of the earlier Court of Appeal of...
Quick alerter post, to be amended later: judgment in R (on the application of Daley-Murdock) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] EWCA Civ 161 is now available on BAILII and it looks like Mirza will follow soon. They were heard as conjoined appeals. The outcome of Mirza...
There have been several quite distraught sounding commenters on my previous piece on the outcome of the Quila case, which is understandably causing confusion. I thought it might be useful to set out what I understand to be the current legal position. The Secretary of State is appealing the Court...
Immigration Minister Damian Green has authorised discrimination by visa officers on the basis of nationality. This follows on from a finding last year by John Vine, Chief Inspector of the UK Border Agency, that visa officers were discriminating against Pakistani visa applicants. See recent coverage here on the blog....
There are many illegal immigrants who have come forward to the Home Office, made themselves known, made an application to remain in the UK and then been refused and politely asked to leave the country. Nothing wrong with that, you might think. There are in fact two very serious problems,...
As you may be aware, the deadline for responding within the Legal Aid Proposed Cuts consultation is imminent i.e. 12pm 14.02.2011. If you have not done so already, may I urge all legal aid firms, not-for-profit organisations and supporters of legal aid generally to send in their responses. I will...
As some may have noticed, I’ve made a few minor changes to the blog in the last few days. I’ve added new pages about instructing the barristers here at Renaissance Chambers, both for solicitors and members of the public, and about contributing guest posts to the blog. I’ve removed some...
In what to me is a shocking development, we learn through the case of R (on the application of AO) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] EWHC 110 (Admin) (28 January 2011) that it actually takes the UK Border Agency longer to process a child’s asylum claim...
The host of the UK Human Rights Blog, 1 Crown Office Row, is a chambers that claims “23 Attorney-General’s Panel counsel in 2010”. Sadly, the 2nd February article Analysis: Children’s “best interests” and the problem of balance is a rather negative and sadly dismissive perspective on the subject of children’s...
The Supreme Court has today handed down judgment in a major case on the best interests of children generally and the best interests of British Citizen children specifically. ZH (Tanzania) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] UKSC 4 finally addresses the weight to be given to the...
There have been a few quite interesting tribunal determinations recently, which I have overlooked for various reasons. I thought it was high time for a catch up, otherwise I’ll never force myself to sit down and digest them. MJB (Inability to provide protection, JAM) Trinidad & Tobago CG [2010] UKUT...
In his report late last year on the entry clearance operation based in Abu Dhabi, the ‘hub’ for processing claims from Pakistan and several Gulf states, the Chief Inspector of UKBA, John Vine, made a stark finding of racial discrimination by Entry Clearance Officers against Pakistani applicants for entry clearance:...
The European Court of Human Rights has just held that it is unlawful to send asylum seekers to Greece under what is widely known as the ‘Dublin II’ Regulation for their asylum claims to be processed there. The case is MSS v Greece and Belgium, no. 30696/09, 21 January 2010...
I gave a short presentation this morning to John Vine, the Chief Inspector of UKBA. I thought I’d share it with you. It lacks a certain something without my narration, I feel, but it at least gives you the gist. The presentation was based on ILPA submissions to the Parliamentary...
The routine detention of immigrant children by the last Government was a disgrace. Claimed changes to detention policy by the current incumbents and the recent case of R (on the application of Suppiah) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] EWHC 2 (Admin) (11 January 2011) reveal just...
With New Year Celebrations follow the dreaded New Year Resolutions, well for most of us anyway… And so this year, it is my task today to remind and urge as many of you as possible to respond within the consultation to the Green Paper proposing drastic cuts in legal aid....
Although not quite on the scale of Wikileaks, Free Movement can today publish a confidential leaked document from the UK Government. It is entirely in keeping with the traditional Home Office practice of bundling as many immigrants out of the country during public holidays (“Your lawyer is on holiday? Shame…”)....
Many thanks to David Chirico for showing me this case (who I understand was in turn tipped off by Muhunthan Paramesvaran at Wilson and Co), and to Seema Farazi (of Doughty Street) for arguing it. Why it has not been reported, one can only speculate. A high-powered panel consisting of...
The Court of Appeal has declared unlawful the application of the increased spouse visa age to the appellants in the Quila appeal. The judgment is available now: Quila & Anor v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2010] EWCA Civ 1482 (21 December 2010) This blog (and the editor)...
There have been two big developments in the last week or so: the ‘ending’ of child detention and the successful challenge to the temporary mad cap (as I link to think of it). On child detention, Alan Travis of The Guardian was clearly well briefed as he managed to publish...
I thought I’d start putting together a list of the myriad ways in which the Home Office wastes money (mainly public funds, also private sometimes) in the small world of immigration. It makes my blood boil that legal aid is being brutally slashed in immigration and across the whole area...
I have struggled to write anything that would do justice to the late David Burgess, who died a few weeks ago. I cannot let his death pass without acknowledgement on this website, though. He died under an underground train and murder charges have been brought. It is a tragically early...
Welcome to the first post on Free Movement not by freemovement! Several of us in the immigration team at Renaissance Chambers will be contributing posts to this blog in future, and this is the first effort. You may need to bear with us a little as we find our digital...
A doctor ‘is no longer considered an acceptable professional person’ by the Home Office. The quotation is taken directly from an email from a policy adviser in the UKBA Nationality Group. Doctors were quietly dropped from mention in the application form for British citizenship and removed from the UKBA list...
[UPDATED: to include link to case] I won a case in the Upper Tribunal the other day that I think is worth sharing. Despite, or perhaps because of, the wide(ish) effect of the findings it seems unlikely to be approved for reporting by the UT’s shadowy reporting committee (more on...
