It is a shame to come back on a sour note, but it is difficult not to be cheerful about the ruin of Phil Woolas, ex Immigration Minister. He has been stripped of his constituency, barred from standing for public office for three years and has earned himself a prominent...
I have taken the surprisingly easy decision to wind down Free Movement. For reasons that continue to escape me and which have never been explained by John O, formerly of NCADC, he left that organisation in April 2010 and set up a website called, imaginatively enough, Free Movement. It can...
New Immigration Rules have just been laid in Statement of Changes CM 7944. The main change is that the English language requirement for spouses and partners has been introduced, as expected. It takes effect for new applications made on or after 29 November 2010. Those with applications in before that...
As recently as 14 September 2010 the Government’s position was that it is not enforcing returns to Zimbabwe. In a debate in the Commons on that day the following question and answer were given: Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab): Given the critical situation in Zimbabwe, does it remain the Government’s...
Practitioners have seen a considerable increase in the number of applications for entry clearance that have been refused on the general grounds for refusal. The reasons are often opaque at best. Some simply refer to the contents of a Document Verification Report (DVR) and do not disclose this report. Many...
UKBA has published a new fact finding report on the situation in Zimbabwe. It is, probably not by co-incidence, just in time for the new test case on Zimbabwe, due to begin on 20 October 2010 and in which the Immigration Advosory Service are again acting. Presumably, UKBA will be...
The methods and reports of controversial linguistic analysis company Sprakab, based in Sweden and used by UKBA in disputed nationality asylum cases, have been warmly endorsed by the tribunal in the case RB (Linguistic evidence Sprakab) Somalia [2010] UKUT 329 (IAC). Sprakab works only for governments and has only ever...
The tribunal has held that it is safe to return to Iraq. In HM and Others (Article 15(c)) Iraq CG [2010] UKUT 331 (IAC) President Blake finds that The degree of indiscriminate violence characterising the current armed conflict taking place in Iraq is not at such a high level that...
The Government has confirmed that removals to Greece under the Dublin II Regulation have been suspended pending the outcome of the test case. This comes following a number of recent news items on the calamity that is the Greek asylum ‘system’. Or, in the words of UNHCR themselves, ‘humanitarian crisis’....
UKBA has published a new policy on dealing with children, specifically asylum applications by unaccompanied children. It went ‘live’ on 1 September 2010 and can be found with the earlier link or in the Asylum Process Guidance Special Cases section. The policy is a considerable improvement on the previous version....
Substantial rises are set for most immigration fees on 1 October 2010, on the basis of the laughable justification that UKBA ‘want to ensure that we can offer a good level of customer service’. They also openly state that the increases are to ‘mitigate against a reduction in income to...
It has come to my attention that Google Ads sometimes (or possibly always) show on Free Movement to those not already logged in as WordPress users – i.e. everyone except me sometimes sees Google Ads on my blog, basically. This blog is hosted mainly for free on WordPress.com. In truth...
The tragic demise of Refugee and Migrant Justice, formerly known as the Refugee Legal Centre, leaves a gaping and unfillable void in the immigration sector. With its higher than average success rate and top notch training and nurturing programme for asylum lawyers, it is simply irreplaceable. What happened? I start...
The tribunal has allowed two appeals on the basis that Pankina does not only apply to the three month rule and that all an applicant need do is comply with the requirements of the Immigration Rules themselves. See FA and AA (PBS effect of Pankina) Nigeria [2010] UKUT 304 (IAC)...
I am back from my very pleasant holidays and thought I would kick off what feels like a new season with some juicy gossip. Many lawyers in the sector will know that ex immigration judges (then plain old adjudicators, in fact) Patricia Skitmore, John Disley and Harry Mitchell QC joined...
Following Pankina, UKBA laid Statement of Changes HC 382, different parts of which came into effect on 23 July and 12 August 2010. The main changes were to incorporate into the main Immigration Rules some provisions that had previously featured only in the policy guidance and which were declared unlawful...
I still use this blog as my own personal note book of developments I might well want to look up later. I’m currently updating and re-writing the HJT Immigration Manual (ready first week of September in time for the next round of accreditation, available now for a reduced price if...
Yet more good news, this time for children and their parents. In LD (Article 8 best interests of child) Zimbabwe [2010] UKUT 278 (IAC) the President of the Immigration and Asylum Chamber of the Upper Tribunal has found that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is highly...
Some tremendously good news for many refugees: in the new case of FH (Post-flight spouses) Iran [2010] UKUT 275 (IAC) the tribunal has found that Article 8 appeals by the spouses of refugees who married the refugee after the refugee left the country of origin should normally be allowed. Ever...
Plainly the ratio of HJ is not limited just to sexual orientation cases but will apply to all grounds covered by the Convention. I thought it might be interesting to start with that quotation from the paragraph 38 of TM (Zimbabwe) & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home...
I’ve been silent on this so far for fear of losing my rag. There is much distress still, and criticism of the administrators seems to be growing. Alan George and George Joffe are seeking to hold the Legal Services Commission directly responsible for payment for their unpaid expert reports and...
R (on the application of Medical Justice) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2010] EWHC 1925 (Admin) should be a wake up call to civil servants at UKBA and Ministers in the new Government. The High Court declared unlawful the Home Office policy of conducting no notice removals....
An unpublished UKBA internal investigation has rejected the complaints made by Louise Perrett about the Cardiff asylum team. A summary has been made available. The existence of the ‘grant monkey’ was confirmed, but seems to have been found to be entirely benign. No racial overtones to it, then, and no...
The Home Office has announced that Certificates of Approval will be scrapped in late 2010 or early 2011. This is a belated implementation of the House of Lords judgment in Baiai, handed down exactly two years ago tomorrow, in which their Lordships held that the scheme requiring foreign nationals to...
The Home Office appeal to the Supreme Court in ZO (Somalia) [2010] UKSC 36 has been dismissed. This confirms that in cases where a fresh asylum claim has been made and no decision was reached for a year, the asylum seeker obtains a right to work under European law. This...
The concisely monikered Chief Inspector of the UK Border Agency yesterday published two very critical reports on UKBA operations. One was on the visa operation in Pakistan and the other was on removals of families. These reports were actually completed before the election, but publication was put back during purdah....
I can’t keep up! If things ever quieten down I’ll do a few more weighty analysis posts but in the meantime these alerter ones must suffice. Firstly, the Medical Justice challenge to no-notice removals has succeeded: R (on the application of Medical Justice) v Secretary of State for the Home...
The Government has laid a new Statement of Changes (HC 382) that incorporates the parts of the Points Based System policy guidance ruled unlawful in the Pankina and English UK cases. This reinstitutes the three month £800 requirement and the minimum of level of English language qualification required by foreign...
The related House of Lords decisions of June 2008 (Beoku-Betts, Chikwamba and EB (Kosovo)) should have brought about a sea change in the approach of the Home Office and the immigration tribunal to human rights issues. While there have been improvements in the respect given to fundamental human rights, there...
I’ve been so busy I forgot to post a link to this recent piece on The Guardian’s Comment Is Free site. I have an excuse to mention that now because the Court of Appeal has considered and rejected an appeal against findings by Immigration Judge Woodcraft in a domestic violence...
The Court of Appeal has adopted a helpfully limited approach to the meaning of ‘false representation’ in Immigration Rules 320(7A) and 322(1A), restricting it to cases of deliberate falsehood rather than accidental mistake. The case is AA (Nigeria) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2010] EWCA Civ 773...
HJ (Iran) and HT (Cameroon) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2010] UKSC 31 represents a fundamental change in UK asylum law. The previous settlement, established by the case of Iftikar Ahmed [2000] INLR 1, was a very British and pragmatic one. Essentially, the question of whether future...
Firstly, I am well aware that this blog is seriously behind with a lot of the developments that have taken place in the last fortnight. And a lot has happened. I’ve actually read more or less everything now (iPad + public transport to far flung courts = well-read but pretentious...
UPDATE: see proper post here with analysis. Sorry for the headline, which is in fact an accurate description of what has happened. Although from the half of the judgment I’ve managed to read so far, their Lordships prefer to refer to ‘practising homosexuals’. A bit like the apocryphal ‘popular beat...
The appeal against the Home Office interpretation of the Points Based System has succeeded in the Court of Appeal. Regular readers may remember I went along to and reported on part of the hearing. The case is Secretary of State for the Home Department v Pankina [2010] EWCA Civ 719....
