Charity Help Refugees, supported by the AIRE Centre, has partly succeeded in an appeal challenging the government’s implementation of the “Dubs amendment”. The amendment, which passed into law as section 67 of the Immigration Act 2016, requires the Home Office to bring lone refugee children from mainland Europe to the...
After months of uncertainty we finally have a picture emerging of what the post-Brexit immigration system will look like. We have known for some time that after we leave the EU on 29 March 2019, the plan is to enter a transition period until 31 December 2020 which will see...
Sajid Javid delivered a speech today at the Conservative party conference that is likely to generate headlines for what he had to say on immigration, integration and citizenship. Upon closer inspection, there is less substance to these pronouncements than meets the eye and nothing on serious issues like child registration...
The whole purpose of the hostile environment is to exert indirect immigration control over migrants through employers, landlords, banks and public services. This is seen as an alternative to direct enforcement the old fashioned way, through arrests, detention and enforced removal. We saw in our post yesterday that direct enforcement...
“The government is cracking down harder on both illegal and legal migrants.” “The government does not control immigration.” These two contrasting statements are the prevailing yet paradoxical narratives on immigration in the United Kingdom today. An analysis of recent Home Office enforcement statistics suggests that neither offers an accurate picture...
Welcome to the August 2018 edition of the Free Movement immigration update podcast. This month I start on two subjects I’ve always been interested in, refusals of visit visa applications and the power to deprive people of their British citizenship. Both came to public attention in August due to media...
A British citizen can be deprived of his citizenship if he shows disloyalty to the state, the Court of Appeal has found in the case of Pham v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 2064. The case is interesting, thought-provoking and concerning in equal measure. Taking...
Last week the Scottish Court of Session agreed to make a reference to the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg to determine whether the UK’s notice that it is leaving the EU under Article 50 can be cancelled. The case, formally known as Wightman & Others v...
Judge Geraint Jones QC is well known to lawyers appearing at the Hatton Cross immigration tribunal hearing centre. In the case of Ortega (remittal; bias; parental relationship) [2018] UKUT 298 (IAC) the Upper Tribunal has rejected claims that one of his determinations showed bias against an appellant. Amongst other things...
In this post we are going to look at the requirements for children to obtain permission to enter and stay in the UK under Appendix FM. As we have seen in recent posts on the subject, Appendix FM (for “family members”) sets out the rules for non-EU citizens who want to...
Interesting new report from Jonathan Thomas of the Social Market Foundation called Take Back Control? This report reveals the true extent of the UK government’s control over immigration and makes the case for greater political honesty about that control. The impression given to the UK public has been of an...
An adult who is not a British citizen can apply to become one. This process is known as naturalisation. People will normally be eligible to apply for naturalisation under section 6 of the British Nationality Act 1981 if they meet certain requirements. These include residence requirements. The basic residence requirement...
A new list of fees for immigration and nationality applications comes into effect from 8 October. None of the existing fees have actually changed since April; the Home Office is just adding the charges for Appendix EU “settled status” applications to the list. The Immigration and Nationality (Fees) (Amendment) (EU...
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The Home Office behaved unlawfully in putting on hold a child’s asylum claim for over 21 months, the Upper Tribunal has found. There are thought to be as many as 200 other children in the same position. The child had been admitted to the UK in “Operation Purnia” at the...
In C-369/17 Ahmed, the Court of Justice of the European Union has held that member states must take account of all the circumstances of the crime committed by an individual before deciding that it is a “serious crime” which justifies excluding that person from subsidiary protection. What is subsidiary protection...
Today’s Migration Advisory Committee recommendations are incredibly significant from a UK employer’s perspective. I can immediately see that a huge number of UK employers are likely to be faced with potentially significant new administrative burdens if the recommendations are implemented. The vast majority of UK employers have little or nothing...
The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) has published its long-awaited research into migration from the EU and how it should be managed after Brexit. The report will disappoint advocates of a fairly liberal regime, recommending as it does that if there is no specific agreement with the EU on migration, there...
The UK authorities do not emerge with much humanitarian credit from this newly reported tribunal case. For years the government has strenuously resisted the obviously meritorious and compassionate request by a stateless refugee family to be reunited. As a result of blind adherence to strict rules and a deliberately narrow...
Refugee Legal Support – Athens, a charitable project that sends volunteer immigration lawyers to Greece to give legal advice to refugees, has launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund its work. The project was set up last year with an initial grant from the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association and has since...
Last week the Court of Justice of the European Union upheld the UK’s approach to the Worker Registration Scheme in force between 2004 and 2011 for citizens of new EU countries. The case is C-618/16 Prefeta v UK. The judgment in effect endorses the Home Office view that time spent...
It is one thing when the state seeks to withdraw a permission or privilege. It is a very different matter when it seeks to interfere with an individual’s rights. Privileges are precarious. In the absence of good reason to the contrary, rights should be secure. This emphatic opening line comes...
Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott delivered a speech today on what Labour in government would do about immigration. It doesn’t do to get too excited about these pronouncements, because Labour is not in government, but here is a link to the full text and a few highlights. Labour wants to...
The government has announced a new type of permission to remain in the UK for children resettled from the Calais refugee camp last year who would not otherwise qualify for asylum. So-called “Calais leave” will allow children brought over from the infamous “Jungle” camp between October 2016 and July 2017...
On 4 September the Republic of Ireland announced plans for a new “regularisation scheme” to allow certain undocumented migrants to remain in the country legally. The amnesty will be open to anyone who came to Ireland as an international student between January 2005 and December 2010 and is now undocumented. Although...
Immigration lawyers helping sponsoring universities navigate the complexities of the Points Based System naturally have an economic interest in overseas students — but then so does the rest of the nation. That is the uncompromising conclusion of the independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), whose experts find that “there is no...
In May, Nick wrote about the important High Court decision in R (Lauzikas) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWHC 1045 (Admin), which threw a spanner in the works of the Home Office’s policy of automatic detention of foreign criminals at the end of their sentence. Mr...
Welcome to the July 2018 edition of the Free Movement immigration update podcast. This month I start by discussing some developments in nationality law, then cover the EU Settlement Scheme that is starting to take shape and currently being piloted. While we await Brexit, EU law still applies, so we...
The Court of Appeal has ruled that the Strasbourg decision in Paposhvili v Belgium (application no. 41738/10) has no effect on cases where someone relies on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights to claim that they should not be removed from the UK because of a lack...
In this post, we consider the type of evidence and information which should be gathered to support the appeal of a non-EEA national who has been made subject to an order for deportation. It is adapted from our full online training course on deportation law, available to Free Movement members....
If negotiations on an orderly withdrawal from the European Union break down completely, the UK risks a “chaotic Brexit” on 29 March 2019, with no overall withdrawal agreement in place nor any smaller deals to mitigate the shock of a no deal outcome. Both the UK and EU27 could take...
The Independent and the Telegraph are reporting on the upsetting case of a little boy, born in Leeds, who is being denied re-entry to the UK because the Home Office has revoked his British passport. Mohamed Bangoura, aged six, was staying with relatives in Belgium over the summer and “marched away from...
TF and MA v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] CSIH 58 is a recent Court of Session (Inner House) decision which addresses two key themes within the immigration and asylum sphere. Firstly, the extent to which adverse credibility findings against an appellant on the basis of one...
The government’s immigration inspector, like the rest of us, is a little fed up with Home Office spin. David Bolt published the results of an re-inspection of the refugee family reunion process today with the acid comment: Predictably, the Home Office’s formal response accentuates the positives in my report… Mr...
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Despite our remarks in previous blogs about the useless nature of British Overseas Citizen status, a series of judgments handed down by the High Court this summer demonstrate that this unusual version of British nationality is sufficiently valuable to encourage the pursuit of lengthy and expensive litigation against BOC passport...
Browsing LinkedIn the other day I came across this post by Jacqueline Victor-Mazeli, a barrister at Law Lane Chambers: Appeal hearings [at the First-tier Tribunal] are presently taking place an average of 12 months after decision. The passage of time can see circumstances or caselaw change as well as see...
The British Nationality Act 1981, which took effect on 1 January 1983, introduced British citizenship into UK nationality law. In doing so, it removed the principle of jus soli – the principle by which citizenship is acquired by being born on the territory – from the operation of that nationality...
