Is a statement of changes even a statement of changes nowadays if it doesn’t introduce a new appendix to the Immigration Rules? On 10 September 2020, the government laid the first statement of changes of its infamous “new Point-Based Immigration System”. It includes the addition of five new appendices. The...
Welcome to episode 80 of the Free Movement immigration update podcast. This month we start with the EU Settlement Scheme before turning to a couple of cases at the intersection of immigration law and family law. With the slow down in the court system, there wasn’t a whole lot of...
The Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner (OISC) has announced that its exams are going online for at least the next six months. People hoping to become OISC-regulated immigration advisers will sit their exams remotely until the end of March 2021. All OISC competence assessments were cancelled during the pandemic...
We Presenting Officers can usually be put into two categories. The first group is unable to see anything wrong with any decision and will defend it at all costs. Although hopefully they’re few and far between, anyone with a bit of experience before the tribunal has probably come across them....
Sir James Munby once warned that public confidence in the family courts, which he ran between 2013 and 2018, was undermined by “ignorance, misunderstanding, misrepresentation or worse”. The problem affects all areas of law but takes different forms. “Ignorance”, to adopt Sir James’s blunt phrasing, arises from a lack of...
In the absence of safe and legal routes into the UK, migrants and refugees are undertaking desperate and treacherous journeys across the Channel in small boats and dinghies. On 19 August, news broke of the tragic drowning of Abdulfatah Hamdallah, a young Sudanese man, who had attempted this crossing. The...
Migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats are overwhelmingly genuine refugees, senior Home Office officials have confirmed. Evidence presented to the Home Affairs committee of MPs on 3 September makes clear that the majority of those making the perilous crossing are either being granted refugee status straight away or...
I’ve put together a timeline of British immigration legislation as an experiment. It is not a complete list for several reasons, but I think it captures the main moments in the history of British immigration law. To include absolutely everything would be a very major project (I might get around...
The Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law (JIANL) is the only peer-reviewed journal on British immigration law. It is the official journal of the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association and has a wide readership among interested academics, practitioners, NGOs and others. It publishes challenging, well-written articles with both a domestic...
New guidance on intercountry adoptions has finally been published following a lengthy gap that left parents, practitioners and even Home Office caseworkers struggling with this tricky section of the Immigration Rules. The last in-depth document, written in 2008, disappeared from the Home Office website many years ago – although it...
On 26 August 2020 at 7:45, a flight chartered by the Home Office took off from Stansted airport, heading for France via Dusseldorf. The passengers were asylum seekers from countries such as Iran, Sudan and Yemen. A similar flight took off two weeks before; another is reportedly scheduled for 3...
The Immigration Act 2016 brought about extensive changes to the support available to people on immigration bail. Since those changes came into force in January 2018, tens of thousands of people have struggled against the harsh new system, which has kept many indefinitely detained by the Home Office or has...
Commercial surrogacy — paying someone else to carry and give birth to your child — is banned in the UK, but available overseas. That allows couples and individuals who would otherwise be unable to have children to experience the miracle of life with the aid of a third party. It’s...
The Home Office has so far rejected the majority of EU Settlement Scheme applications that rely on Zambrano rights. New figures show that 770 of the 1,260 Zambrano carers applying for leave to remain under the scheme have been rejected (61%). A non-EU citizen who is the primary carer of...
The popularity and visibility of surrogacy are on the rise, thanks in part to scientific advances, a greater acceptance of LGBT+ rights and popular celebrity stories. The thousands of families created through surrogacy have meant joy for many but the journey towards that goal is usually a challenging one, particularly where...
Racism is the belief that one racial group is above another racial group. It is supported by structural power. Structural power shows up in different ways and ensures unequal distribution of resources through laws, policies and behaviours amongst racial groups, over a range of issues including education, employment opportunities, finances,...
From January 2021, all going to plan, EU free movement will end and employers who want to recruit from overseas will need a licence to sponsor people for work visas. While the government has made it possible for businesses to apply for a sponsor licence ahead of time, the concern...
The High Court has refused a challenge to the conditions at Brook House Immigration Removal Centre in 2017 on all grounds. This is despite the Home Office having made a number of changes to the regime provided by G4S since then in response to criticism. The decision in R (Soltany)...
When the Modern Slavery Act 2015 was introduced, it was heralded by the government as a momentous piece of legislation which would “give protection to the victims who need it”. The Act introduced a reformed system for identifying, supporting and protecting victims of modern slavery or human trafficking in England...
The case of Advocate General for Scotland v Adiukwu [2020] CSIH 47 answers the question of whether the Home Office has a private law duty to grant a person discretionary leave to remain and issue them with a letter to allow them to take up employment once a tribunal has...
In R (Akram) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2020] EWCA Civ 1072, the Court of Appeal has confirmed the high bar for reopening old judgments. The appellant tried to reopen an old judicial review in which he had challenged the refusal of an indefinite leave to remain...
Changes to family visa rules for people from Northern Ireland come into force in a few days’ time, 24 August 2020. Una Boyd outlined the reforms and the background to them on Free Movement when they were announced. We’ve just stumbled across another resource that might be useful: a briefing...
In the case of Ali (permission decisions: errors; slip rule) Pakistan [2020] UKUT 249 (IAC) the Upper Tribunal has held that there is a process for fixing massive cock-ups in an immigration judge’s decision on permission to appeal — so not just to correct errors in a substantive ruling —...
Local authorities have recently made headlines for failing to regularise the immigration status of children in their care. As the case of Darrell and Darren Roberts sadly exemplifies, not taking care of the immigration or citizenship status of children in care can have devastating consequences, including making them liable to...
Migrants’ Law ProjectSolicitor/Caseworker/Barrister Salary Band £34,986 – £38,404A salary of £44,373 may be considered for those at Supervisor level with high levels of experience and expertiseAnnual leave: 25 days per annum plus bank holidays The Migrants’ Law Project, a dynamic public law and public legal education team at Islington Law...
The UK’s long-awaited Domestic Abuse Bill has reached the House of Lords stage of its progress towards becoming law. In the House of Commons, MPs had considered an amendment to lift the no recourse to public funds rule for migrant survivors of domestic abuse. This amendment was proposed to fill...
Welcome to episode 79 of the Free Movement immigration update podcast. This month we’re starting with a few asylum decisions, then talk a little about the Shamima Begum case and go over the latest on coronavirus immigration changes. We look at the Hong Kong BNO visa, mention a couple of...
In Johnson v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2020] EWCA Civ 1032, the Court of Appeal has determined that there is no breach of the General Data Protection Regulation involved in hearing human rights appeals from abroad via video link. Mr Johnson was deported to Jamaica in 2017...
Human beings crossing the English Channel are making headlines again. The number of people who reach the UK via this extremely difficult, dangerous but lawful route is minuscule, and the total number claiming international protection here insignificant compared with the situation in many other countries, yet these stories continue to...
The government is to abandon a highly controversial change to legal aid for online immigration appeals after accepting that it was pushed through unlawfully. The Civil Legal Aid (Remuneration) (Amendment) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020 will now be scrapped and legal aid paid at hourly rates pending a full consultation. In a...
In Pormes v The Netherlands (application no. 25402/14), the European Court of Human Rights has approved the deportation of a man who had lived in the Netherlands between the ages of four and 29, on the basis of multiple convictions for indecent assault. Mr Pormes had a troubled upbringing. He...
On 4 August 2020, the Home Office issued new guidance to its civil servants on how to respond to immigration appeals that the department has lost. The 18-page document can be found here (pdf download). For the most part, the guidance is welcome. Anyone who has ever won an appeal...
Migrants who win an appeal after being wrongly accused of cheating on their English language visa test should now get a proper grant of leave to remain as a result. Following a legal challenge, the Home Office has committed to granting two and a half years of leave to migrants...
The Court of Appeal has backed a High Court decision that a mother and child’s asylum records must be disclosed in family proceedings. In H (A Child) (Disclosure of Asylum Documents) [2020] EWCA Civ 1001, the court rejected arguments that the family judge had failed to attach sufficient weight to...
After the Hardial Singh principles, the Adults at Risk policy is the most important source of law for securing the release of people from immigration detention. It provides a detailed framework for assessing the vulnerability of detainees and balancing vulnerability against the timetable for removal, the risk of absconding and...
Earlier this year JCWI, with the help of Foxglove, launched a legal challenge against the Home Office over its use of an algorithmic “streaming tool” that assigned risk categories to visa applications. The tool, previously covered on Free Movement, scored visa applicants for risk based in part on their nationality....
Over 1,100 people took the Free Movement reader survey this year. I’d like to thank everyone who did so. The positive feedback was enormously encouraging — I read every comment — and the less positive feedback was the whole point of the exercise, so if anything even more valuable. This...
People from Northern Ireland will soon be able to sponsor non-European family members under the light-touch EU Settlement Scheme. The government has recently passed a separate but related measure: the Social Security (Income-Related Benefits) (Persons of Northern Ireland – Family Members) (Amendment) Regulations 2020. The aim of the regulations is...
In Mendes v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2020] EWCA Civ 924 the Court of Appeal considered the process for removing an EU citizen from the UK whilst they have a pending appeal against deportation. The legal issue is largely the same as in the recent case of...
