The hostile environment should be reformed by selective repeal of key provisions, addressing Home Office culture and improved routes to regularisation, an influential think tank has found. Beyond the hostile environment, a report released yesterday by the Institute for Public Policy Research, follows up on a previous look at the...
In an interim relief decision the High Court has ordered the release of an immigration detainee within 48 hours, indicating that judges will not allow the Home Office to use the pandemic as cover to justify long “grace period” delays in releasing detainees. The case is R (Habeb) v Secretary...
Goodbye and good riddance to the “nationality requirement”, which since November 2017 has seen criminal defendants told to state their citizenship during their first appearance in court. A report last year by non-profit law firm Commons Legal found that the rule was deeply unpopular among criminal lawyers and created an...
In the latest round of the legal saga involving Egyptian dissident Yasser Al-Siri, the Court of Appeal has ruled that the Home Office acted unlawfully in only granting him restricted leave to remain after an earlier First-tier Tribunal decision that he is a refugee. There was, the court found, no...
“Illegal migrants’ vaccine amnesty” is the front page of today’s Daily Mail. The paper reports that, in an “unprecedented” move, migrants will be vaccinated against coronavirus irrespective of their immigration status in the UK. In fact this is nothing new: coronavirus diagnosis and treatment, including “routine vaccinations”, have been exempt...
There has been an interesting and mainly polite (if tense) discussion on and off Twitter in recent weeks about advocacy on migrants’ rights. This is in part linked to a short piece I wrote about deportations and a follow-up by Emma Harrison, director of IMIX. I’ve linked to some of...
As we approach 30 June 2021, the deadline to apply for the EU Settlement Scheme, people are increasingly and understandably worried about their applications. In this post, we* try to answer some of the most commonly asked questions about the scheme, for those who haven’t applied yet. You can find...
Praxis, a dynamic, award-winning human rights charity supporting migrants in crisis or at-risk, is recruiting for several different roles as outlined below. Hackney Project Co-ordinator and Senior Immigration Caseworker Location: Mix of remote working and different locations in Hackney and Bethnal Green. Job Type: Full time – 35 hours Duration:...
The High Court has upheld the continued detention of an Indian national in a Category B prison on the basis of a high risk of absconding and serious criminal convictions, despite detention already lasting well over a year. The case is Singh v Secretary of State for the Home Department...
A Bradford solicitor has been struck off for multiple breaches of her professional duties, including reassuring a client that her immigration case was in progress when the application had never been lodged. Legal Futures reports that the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal “upheld a litany of allegations” against Rizwana Jamil, who practised...
In the case of C-255/19 Secretary of State for the Home Department v OA, the Court of Justice of the European Union held (at paragraph 64) that: 1. Article 11(1)(e) of Council Directive 2004/83/EC of 29 April 2004 on minimum standards for the qualification and status of third country nationals...
In FA (Sudan) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2021] EWCA Civ 59, the Court of Appeal has confirmed that someone applying to stay in the UK under the domestic abuse rules must have had permission to remain as a partner. This appeal was a bold challenge to...
Government press offices have a habit of re-announcing popular policies, and so it is with the BNO visa. The Home Office has confirmed that the special visa scheme for people from Hong Kong with British National (Overseas) citizenship opens for applications from 31 January 2021. The application process is digital...
Ndwanyi (Permission to appeal; challenging decision on timeliness) Rwanda [2020] UKUT 378 (IAC) is about how a respondent can challenge a decision that an application for permission to appeal is in time, when in fact it is not in time. In this case the Home Office had lost the appeal...
No doubt you will have read about the mudslinging between the UK and EU over the lack of a visa-free deal for touring musicians and entertainers. This has been retweeted and attacked by seemingly every artist you’ve heard of, and even been debated in Parliament. The claims are that the...
Lowe v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2021] EWCA Civ 62 is about the role of the Upper Tribunal in deportation appeals. The role of an appellate court when reviewing the findings of fact made by the court below sounds straightforward: it will only intervene if the findings...
Stealing someone’s identity is not a “false representation” for the purposes of a 20-year long residence application, the Upper Tribunal has found. The case is Mahmood (paras. S-LTR.1.6. & S-LTR.4.2.; Scope) Bangladesh [2020] UKUT 376 (IAC). Bangladeshi national Sultan Mahmood, 41, has been living in the UK since at least...
Interesting piece over on the EU Law Analysis site by Aleksandra Jolkina about the flawed approach by the First-tier and Upper Tribunals to questions of marriages of convenience in EU law. The tribunals frequently blend the highly ambiguous domestic “genuine and subsisting relationship” requirement with the much more objective EU...
Care workers eligible for the EU Settlement Scheme seem unaware of the need to apply, a new report has found. The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) surveyed 290 social care workers and found that as many as one in three had never heard of the Settlement Scheme,...
Building on CJ’s briefing on the Tier 1 (Investor) route last year, this article contains five top tips for the preparation of an Investor application. Before we begin, it is worth recalling the relevant Immigration Rules on entry clearance for Investors. Table 7 of Appendix A to the Immigration Rules...
The distinction between a “claim” and an “application” was at the heart of the Upper Tribunal’s recent decision in Yerokun (Refusal of claim; Mujahid) Nigeria [2020] UKUT 377 (IAC). Mr Yerokun made an application for permission to remain in the UK based on his human right to private and family...
The European Court of Human Rights has confirmed that the final offence committed by someone before deportation action is taken against them does not need to be particularly significant if they have a history of serious offending. In Munir Johanna v Denmark (application no. 56803/18) and Khan v Denmark (application...
… when a young Vietnamese person is found living in a room with a padlock on the outside of the door, describes working for no payment in a nail bar, gives a vague account of apparently chance encounters with a series of Vietnamese persons as part of her journey and...
The High Court has ordered the release on bail of a detainee who is subject to deportation action but suffers from serious mental health problems. Full judgments at the interim relief stage are relatively unusual so R (RS) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2021] EWHC 54 (Admin)...
Furious musicians have gathered over 260,000 signatures on a petition to the British government asking for a “Europe-wide visa-free work permit for touring professionals and artists”. In response, the government claims that “during our negotiations, we proposed measures to allow creative professionals to travel and perform in both the UK...
Vacancy: Senior immigration advisor/solicitor Organisation: Seraphus Salary: Minimum £36,000 per annum – maximum dependent on experience Location: The vacancy is full-time, five days per week, in London. We support flexible working hours with home-working. While this role will be delivered remotely while public health necessitates it, there is an opportunity...
In BTT v R [2021] EWCA Crim 4 the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) required a man appealing a conviction for growing cannabis to give oral evidence about his account of human trafficking. It then relied on this evidence to depart from the Upper Tribunal’s decision that he was a...
The end of free movement has, for better or worse, given rise to a number of new visa routes catering for workers looking to establish themselves in the UK. Joining their ranks is the frontier worker permit which opened to new applicants on 10 December 2020. Although only open to...
Dr Melanie Griffiths and I have spent four years working on an academic article mapping, explaining, analysing and evaluating the hostile environment policy. It is finally done and dusted and is open access, so you can take a look over at Critical Social Policy. I approached Melanie to co-author something...
A Palestinian refugee threatening to take his own life in a dispute over the age recorded on his residence permit has lost a judicial review at the Court of Appeal. The case is (WA (Palestinian Territories)) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2021] EWCA Civ 12. Background The...
How serious must a person’s “extremism” be to justify exclusion from the Refugee Convention? Three years ago, the Court of Appeal in Youssef & N2 v Secretary of State for the Home Department lowered the bar for exclusion from the Convention’s protection by disqualifying an asylum seeker for “general” promotion...
A second report in the space of two days from the immigration inspector, this time on the Home Office’s use of sanctions and penalties. These are an integral part of the “hostile environment” policy of outsourcing immigration control to the private sector. Companies can be fined if, for example, they...
One quirk of government statistics is that they no longer record how many deportation orders are successfully appealed. For tedious reasons of appeals law, since 2015/16 the relevant stats have only shown deportation appeals by EU citizens; deportation appeals by non-EU citizens are lumped into a larger category of “human...
Lawyers are prone to creating “terms of art”, i.e. a phrase which has a specific meaning within a particular branch of law, distinct from its usage in ordinary English. In Patel (historic injustice; NIAA Part 5A) India [2020] UKUT 351 (IAC), the Upper Tribunal defines the phrases “historic injustice” and...
The Home Office should do more to “professionalise” the officials it sends to argue immigration cases in court, the immigration inspector has found. A report by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, published today, says that Home Office Presenting Officers (HOPOs) need better training and more rigorous professional...
The government has introduced important new rules on the handling of claims for asylum with effect from 1 January 2021. Guidance for Home Office asylum caseworkers was published the day before, on 31 December, fleshing out some of the operational details. What is not in the policy document is as...
Three lawyers convicted in 2019 of providing unregulated immigration advice worth millions have been ordered to cough up over £45,000 between them in fines and compensation. Dan Romulus Dandes, Babbar Ali Jamil and Zia Bi were sentenced at the Old Bailey on 5 January 2021 for their roles in a...
Welcome to episode 84 of the Free Movement immigration update podcast. We’re going over what happened in December 2020, which feels a bit like it was asylum month: we’ve got some very important changes to the Immigration Rules on claiming asylum and safe third countries; an interesting case on military...
