We are told repeatedly by UK politicians that EU citizenship is too expansive; it confers too many rights to encourage too much freedom of movement to too many people. This is why The British People voted to leave in the 2016 referendum, we are told. It is refreshing to read...
Several cases have come to light in recent weeks and months of the treatment of Commonwealth citizens who arrived in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s. Unable to provide evidence of their right to reside in the UK, these legal immigrants are losing jobs, being detained, and being denied...
Migration policy experts have warned that the system of registering EU citizens to stay in the UK after Brexit risks excluding the most vulnerable, who will end up as unlawfully resident if they fail to register or are turned down. A briefing from the influential Migration Observatory at the University...
In the wide-ranging and somewhat sorry case of El Gazzaz v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 532 the Court of Appeal has confirmed the strength of the presumption in favour of deporting foreign criminals. Page contentsCriminal convictions and mental ill-healthDeporting foreign criminals is in the public...
Official headnote to Yussuf (meaning of “liable to deportation”) [2018] UKUT 117 (IAC): Section 32 of the UK Borders Act 2007 impliedly amends section 3(5)(a) of the Immigration Act 1971 by (a) removing the function of the Secretary of State of deeming a person’s deportation to be conducive to the public...
The Upper Tribunal has confirmed and applied the earlier case of Mahmud (S.85 NIAA 2002 – ‘new matters’) [2017] UKUT 488 (IAC) on what constitutes a “new matter” for the purpose of an appeal. In short, it seems any new fact not previously considered by the Home Office will be put down...
Welcome to the February 2018 edition of the Free Movement immigration update podcast. This month I look at some legal developments with Brexit and review no less than three Supreme Court decisions on immigration, nationality and detention. There have also been some case law on the Points Based System, which...
Lord Justices Hickinbottom, Kitchin and Coulson have delivered an interesting judgment concerning the free-standing balancing exercise of Article 8 ECHR in the context of a leave curtailment. The case is Tikka v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 632. The Court of Appeal found that the...
MK and Gega v R [2018] EWCA Crim 667 is about who should face the burden of proof when a criminal defendant relies on the new “victim of slavery/trafficking” defence in the Modern Slavery Act 2015. In the first appellate judgment on this issue, the Court of Appeal has ruled...
Back in July 2015, the Upper Tribunal delivered a puzzling judgment in the case of R (Bilal Ahmed) v SSHD (EEA/s 10 appeal rights: effect (IJR) [2015] UKUT 436 (IAC). The nub of the decision was that where the Secretary of State refuses an application on the basis that the...
Secretary of State for the Home Department v Said [2018] EWCA Civ 627 is about how long the Home Office can delay making an immigration decision before the applicants can successfully claim for damages under the Human Rights Act 1998. The Home Office was appealing a decision from the High...
When I first started blogging I was really an oddity for being a lawyer that would effectively self-publish. People couldn’t quite work out why I was doing it and assumed that I was some sort of PR-hungry attention junkie. There were some people who thought that it was inappropriate for...
Today is the deadline for employers with 250 or more employees to publish calculations showing the size of the pay gap between their male and female workers. The gender pay gap is the percentage difference between the average hourly earnings for men and women; men earn 18.4% more than women...
The judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in T.C.E. v Germany (application no. 58681/12) has a whiff of Groundhog Day. For the second time in just over six months the court found that a Nigerian national convicted of drug-related crimes could not prevent deportation by relying on his relationship with his...
Here’s your round-up of the immigration and asylum stories that made national headlines this week. This is the last instalment of this round-up as a standalone article. As explained in the response to the Free Movement reader survey, these weekly posts are an attempt to meet demand for more general...
The Home Office has failed to stick to claimed improvements in how it treats child refugees in the past few years, according to the independent immigration inspector. David Bolt’s inspection of how the Home Office considers the best interests of unaccompanied asylum seeking children, published yesterday, notes that the Home...
The momentous decision to begin Brexit in March 2017 was announced the previous October, when Theresa May made her first speech as Prime Minister to the Conservative Party conference. For all the impressions of chaos in between — including the sound and fury of the Miller litigation, in which the...
I’ve blogged previously about my concern for EU citizens falling through the cracks in terms of their post-Brexit residence and citizenship rights. Some of these worries are now articulated in a more formal way in two legal briefings undertaken for the Eurochildren in Brexiting Britain project at the University of Birmingham. I...
Government measures aimed at stopping irregular migrants from renting a home are not being properly evaluated, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration has found. The controversial Right to Rent scheme is “yet to demonstrate its worth as a tool to encourage immigration compliance, with the Home Office failing...
The Court of Appeal in Secretary of State for the Home Department v MS (Pakistan) [2018] EWCA Civ 594 looked at whether the Upper Tribunal can second-guess the decision of the government to reject someone’s application to be considered a victim of human trafficking. It found that the tribunal can only re-make...
[Editor’s note: this article is now largely superseded by new rules on settlement for Turkish nationals from 6 July 2018.] A new version of the Home Office guidance on applications from self-employed Turkish businesspersons for leave under the Turkish European Communities Association Agreement (ECAA), commonly known as the “Ankara Agreement”,...
The Court of Appeal in Secretary of State for the Home Department v (OP) Jamaica [2018] EWCA Civ 316 dealt with a deportation appeal in the context of assessing the weight to be given to Article 8 and the best interests of children. The judgment echoes previous decisions, in that...
Immigrants from other EU countries do not reduce average wages for UK-born workers. So said the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), a crack team of independent economists that advises the government on immigration policy, in an interim report published today. There is some evidence that the net effect of immigration is...
In the recently reported case of Elsakhawy (immigration officers: PACE) [2018] UKUT 86 (IAC), the Upper Tribunal dismissed an appeal concerning the applicability of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) to immigration officers exercising powers of “pastoral” interview. PACE is the law which safeguards the rights of those...
On 19 March the European Union and the UK published the impressively named Draft Agreement on the Withdrawal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community. In other words, a draft Brexit divorce agreement. This blog post will focus...
In the recently published case of MT and ET (child’s best interests; ex tempore pilot) Nigeria [2018] UKUT 88 (IAC), the Upper Tribunal looked again at the balancing exercise between a child’s best interests and the public interest when deciding whether it is reasonable to expect a child to leave...
Here’s your round-up of the immigration and asylum stories that made national headlines this week. Refugee fostering questions The Mail says that the immigration system has failed in the case of Ahmed Hassan, the 18-year-old Parsons Green bomber, who is said to have admitted links with IS to Home Office officials shortly...
A recent case shows that practitioners should beware the Home Office’s use of consent orders in judicial review claims, write Kim Renfrew and Naga Kandiah of MTC & Co. Solicitors. Our client SP is an asylum seeker of Sri Lankan origin. SP submitted further evidence to the Home Office, to...
A quick note on a recent asylum judgment in Scotland — nothing earth-shattering in it, our friends at McGill & Co tell me, but a reminder to be on the alert for multiple misstatements of the threshold for success in decision letters rejecting further submissions. Paragraph 353 of the Immigration...
The number of cases of deprivation of British citizenship has risen sharply in recent years. For an in-depth look at the issues, see my earlier post on The rise of modern banishment: deprivation and nullification of British citizenship. The increasing use of the power by the Secretary of State has led...
Campaigners seeking to confirm whether the UK’s Article 50 notification triggering Brexit can be unilaterally revoked are one step closer to getting a decision from the Court of Justice of the European Union. Yesterday the Inner House of the Court of Session granted permission to proceed in Wightman and others v...
A pan-European alliance of NGOs has launched a new database allowing for easy comparison of how different European countries protect people left without citizenship of any country due to quirks in nationality law. The Statelessness Index covers a dozen European countries, including the United Kingdom. The European Network on Statelessness...
Businesses across the UK began receiving notification emails last week from the Home Office confirming that their applications for restricted certificates of sponsorship had been approved. This is because they had met an as yet unpublished points threshold. The Home Office has saved the bad news for today. Yet again there...
On 23 February 2018, the Home Office issued new guidance on dealing with applications for leave to remain on the basis of family life as a partner or parent or on the basis of private life, on a ten-year route to settlement. Under the heading “changes from last version of...
The Home Affairs Committee of MPs has announced that it is broadening an existing enquiry into the treatment of migrants held at Brook House detention centre to look at the detention system more widely. The influential committee, which is headed up by Labour heavyweight Yvette Cooper, said on Friday afternoon...
Short and sweet is the best way to describe the High Court’s decision in BS v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWHC 454 (Admin). It comes as a useful reminder that whether detention is “reasonable” depends on all the circumstances of the case. In particular, the risk of a...
Here’s your round-up of the immigration and asylum stories that made national headlines this week. Far-right activists denied entry Last weekend, the Evening Standard and Mail picked up on the travails of three far-right YouTube stars excluded from the UK on the ground that their presence was not conducive to the...
A short Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules HC895 was laid yesterday, 15 March 2018. It makes minor changes to the Rules to take effect on 6 April. The explanatory memorandum summarises the tweaks as being to: Ensure that an asylum claim can be deemed inadmissible, and not be substantively considered by...
