Last March, Asylum Aid and NatCen held a discussion about our research findings on women and asylum appeals, kindly hosted by Garden Court Chambers. The most practical of the resulting recommendations was from barrister Kathryn Cronin: to produce an online resource to let asylum appellants know what to expect at...
The Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner (the OISC to those who know it well) has quietly published guidance outlining when it considers it will be illegal to provide advice to EU citizens and their non-EU family members under the settled status scheme. The guidance barely mentions the scheme itself...
An investigation into abuse at Brook House immigration removal centre has castigated those in charge of the privately run detention centre. The report, commissioned by outsourcing firm G4S following an exposé by the BBC’s Panorama programme last year, concludes that Brook House is afflicted with incompetent management, poor facilities and chronic understaffing....
A top legal adviser to the Court of Justice of the European Union has recommended that the UK be allowed to cancel its Article 50 notification triggering Brexit and stay in the EU if it wants. Advocate General Sánchez-Bordona writes in an Opinion released this morning that the UK has...
Immigration lawyers have until Thursday 6 December to publish their rates under price transparency rules issued by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. The SRA says that firms must put information about what they charge individual clients for immigration applications and tribunal appeals, except for asylum work, in a prominent place on...
Our comprehensive online immigration law training course for new immigration lawyers or advisers is perfect for the OISC Level 1 exams. It costs just £20 plus VAT to get started as a monthly member with access to this and over 100 hours of our other courses, and you can cancel...
New figures from the Home Office reveal that asylum seekers are being held in detention centres for five times longer than the government’s own recommendation when the system was introduced. The data, obtained from a Freedom of Information request, shows that the average asylum applicant under Detained Asylum Casework is...
The Court of Appeal has allowed a deportation appeal because the appellant was able to demonstrate that the strength of his family and private life is a “very compelling circumstance” outweighing the public interest in deportation. Forrester v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 2653 illustrates...
This is a collection of statistics on the UK immigration system. The Office for National Statistics, Home Office and Courts & Tribunals Service publish regular quarterly data on the number of migrants coming to the UK, how immigration applications are processed and how appeals are disposed of. We use these...
In Oksuzoglu (EEA appeal – “new matter”) [2018] UKUT 00385 (IAC), the appellant was a Ukrainian national and the sponsor was a British national. They had spent some seven months in Cyprus and on their return to the UK, the appellant applied for a residence card invoking the Surinder Singh...
R (Basir) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 2612 is about section 3C of the Immigration Act 1971. Section 3C works as follows: where a person makes a valid application to extend his or her leave to enter or remain and the application is refused,...
Today the High Court granted permission for a judicial review challenge to the exorbitant fees that the Home Office charges to children registering as British citizens. The Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens argues that charging kids £1,012 to take up their legal entitlement to become British...
A client’s statement “I was foolish to…” in a witness statement is sometimes the starting point for the submission “My client is not clever enough to lie/to lie to the extent alleged by the Respondent”. It is an uncomfortable submission to make in the presence of a client but it...
People who want a UK visa or visa extension have to provide the Home Office with “biometric information”; that is, fingerprints and a photograph. If they don’t sent in their biometric information, the visa application will be invalid and the applicant risks becoming an overstayer. This, as the decision in...
In R (Khan) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (Dishonesty, tax return, paragraph 322(5)) [2018] UKUT 384 (IAC) the Upper Tribunal has issued guidance to the Home Office on how to properly decide applications from Tier 1 (General) applicants which raise issues of dishonesty under paragraph 322(5) of...
In Joined Cases C‑47/17 and C‑48/17 X and X v Staatssecretaris van Veiligheid en Justitie, the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that failure to respond to a re-examination request under the Dublin III procedure does not mean that the defaulting member state takes over the asylum...
A v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2016] CSIH 38 is an important 2016 decision from the Court of Session in Scotland, the full impact of which has still to be felt. It concerns the Immigration Rules, as they apply to spouses of refugees, where the spouse has...
UK and EU negotiators have just published a declaration setting out their ambitions for the future relationship between this country and the remainder of the EU after Brexit. To give the document its full title, it is the: Draft Political Declaration setting out the framework for the future relationship between...
The Home Office has today published guidance on “paragraph 322(5)” cases following a review of settlement refusals under the controversial rule. The takeaway is that no refusals should be issued without interviewing the applicant first. Migrants on a Tier 1 (General) visa who want to settle in the UK have...
The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, became a British citizen yesterday. The Canadian-born economist attended Camden Town Hall for the mandatory citizenship ceremony. Jenny Headlam-Wells, the Mayor of Camden, tweeted a picture of Carney posing in front of Union flag banners yesterday afternoon. Pleased to welcome Mark...
Welcome to the October 2018 edition of the Free Movement immigration update podcast. We posted 40 articles on the blog last month, but are realistically limited in a podcast to discussing the most important ten or so. A Supreme Court judgment obviously qualifies, so we start with that one on...
Yes, you read that headline right. In HKK (Article 3: burden/standard of proof) [2018] UKUT 386 (IAC), counsel rather ambitiously attempted to reopen the question of where lies the burden of proof in Article 3 appeals. TL;DR: the burden of proof rests with the appellant.
...R (Lucas) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 2541 is about re-detention following the grant of immigration bail by the First-tier Tribunal under the now repealed provisions of the Immigration Act 1971. The Court of Appeal ruled that tribunal bail finishes once the person has...
David Bolt clearly wishes he had never gone near the issue of asylum accommodation. The immigration inspector, who published a report today on the provision of housing for asylum seekers, remarks mournfully that its findings are “likely to please no-one”. It certainly has not pleased the Home Office, which having...
The Upper Tribunal has ruled that Paragraph 339C of the Immigration Rules fails to accurately transpose the requirements of the Qualification Directive governing the grant of humanitarian protection. The outcome means that asylum seekers who face serious harm in their country of origin, even if that is not the country...
In one of the longest running bits of immigration litigation ever (not quite as long as the Cyprus Sovereign Base Area refugee cases…), the Afghan asylum seekers who arrived on a hijacked plane in 2000 have been granted general permission to appeal by the Upper Tribunal. The legal point is...
In the case of KV v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 2483 the Court of Appeal accepts that future statelessness is a relevant consideration in an appeal against deprivation of British citizenship obtained on the basis of fraud. The court also gives guidance on the...
In R (Safeer) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 2518 the Court of Appeal has misdirected itself on how to approach factual disputes in the context of an application for judicial review. The error did not affect the result because the appeal was bound to...
Theresa May has begun what the press is describing as a Brexit “fightback“, putting the case for the draft Brexit deal published last week. The deal’s saving grace, according to the Prime Minister, is that it ends EU free movement so far as the UK is concerned. Writing in the...
Protests have been held outside Campsfield House immigration removal centre on the last Saturday of the month for the last 20 years. The detention centre’s reputation has been scarred by escapes, riots and hunger strikes ever since it opened north of Oxford in 1993, although in recent years barbarities elsewhere...
The Home Office considers some foreign nationals living in the UK to be a threat to national security. Sometimes, to deport those individuals (as the government no doubt prefers) would be unlawful, because of how they would be treated on return to their country of origin. Perhaps the most notorious...
The Home Office has admitted that some potential victims of the Windrush scandal were not identified because they were incorrectly labelled as criminals. The failure to include these people in the review of how many members of the Windrush generation were wrongly removed or detained, revealed after probing from Parliament’s...
We do legal rather than political punditry on this blog, but the resignation this morning of two Cabinet ministers bodes ill for the chances of the draft Brexit deal being approved by parliament. Even before that, the negative reaction of Conservative MPs to the terms published last night led commentators...
1.1. The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association (ILPA) drafted the following report as a joint commentary by experienced immigration practitioners on the EU Settlement Scheme. We hope this expertise assists in the development of the scheme and to achieve its intended purpose of safeguarding the rights of EU citizens living in...
The Supreme Court has allowed the appeal in the case of Rhuppiah v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] UKSC 58. Giving the sole judgment, Lord Wilson holds that a “precarious” immigration status is any status short of Indefinite Leave to Remain but allows the appeal on the...
Appellants in immigration cases would normally be delighted if a court made an unambiguous finding that the government had acted unfairly towards them. Not so the family of Bashar Al-Assad. In a very unusual judgment, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) in LA & Ors (Natualisation : Substantive) [2018] UKSIAC...
Following on from Chanda the other week, the Court of Appeal in Li [2018] EWCA Civ 2411 returns to the issue of false documents, this time in a judicial review case for an appellant attempting to make a Tier 1 application. In a previous application the appellant had submitted what...
Invalid applications: in recent years, this has become one of the trickiest and dense parts of our immigration law. It’s one of my favourite areas because it’s so interesting and technical (as those of you who attended the Immigration Law Masterclass Conference will know!). You might ask what the big...
