The Home Office has been found in serious breach of its duty to the court after submitting misleading evidence about how it handled the rescue of refugee children from the demolished Calais “jungle” camp. The judgment in R (Citizens UK) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA...
Practitioners not au fait with February’s decision in Charles (human rights appeal: scope) Grenada [2018] UKUT 89 (IAC) may want to take a quick glance over it. The Home Office guidance on appeal rights has just been updated to include a page on what it means for human rights appeals....
What’s another few months when you’ve been waiting two decades? For the past 20 years, a group of Iraqi and Syrian Kurds have been marooned on a British military base in Cyprus, recognised as refugees but denied settlement in the UK. In R (Tag Eldin Ramadan Bashir and others) v...
This is probably a determination best ignored, from the judge who brought us Sala. The headnote reads: 1. An appeal under s 82(1)(c) is an appeal against revocation of the basis upon which the leave referred to in s 82(2)(c) was granted. 2. The only allowable ground under s 84(3)(a)...
In a deeply unsurprising turn of events (see posts passim), the Court of Appeal has overturned a favourable deportation decision in Secretary of State for the Home Department v MR (Pakistan) [2018] EWCA Civ 1598. MR, a citizen of Pakistan, entered the UK in October 2002 as a student and...
Those who were present at the recent Administrative Law Bar Association breakfast meeting on costs in judicial review will recall Alison Pickup, Legal Director of the Public Law Project, reminding us that Judicial Review in the Upper Tribunal is not technically judicial review, and of the quotation marks around that...
Some amendments to the British Nationality (General) Regulations 2003. From the explanatory notes: Regulation 2 amends regulation 3 of the 2003 Regulations, as a consequence of the amendment made by regulation 4 of these Regulations, and requires applicants for registration as a British citizen, British Overseas citizen or British subject...
The decision in Khan & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 1684 brings to an end the long-running ETS saga, so called after the Educational Testing Service company that discovered large-scale cheating on its Home Office-approved English exams. In a previous case the Court...
Today the government published a follow-up report by Stephen Shaw on its progress in implementing his 2016 recommendations on detaining vulnerable people. The Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, also announced a series of reforms including a pilot of mandatory bail hearings after two months. The original Shaw Review, back in 2016, had...
I couldn’t bring myself to spend a sunny weekend poring over the statement of changes to the Immigration Rules that landed on Friday afternoon, so here is a belated catch-up. In fact the changes are not the usual tinkering but the insertion of a new section, called Appendix EU, catering...
Macastena v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 1558 highlights the difference between extended family members’ rights and family members’ rights under EU law, as well as the extent of the tribunal’s statutory remit. Background to the case The appellant is a Kosovan national who came...
Homeless migrants are being kept in detention centres indefinitely because the Home Office is no longer finding them a place to live after release. The department’s refusal or inability to provide accommodation under a new immigration bail system introduced this year means that potentially thousands of migrants in detention have...
The guidance that Tier 2 and 5 sponsors must follow was updated last week. The new version applies to sponsor licence applications made, and certificates of sponsorship assigned, on or after 18 July 2018. Some of the key changes are: Fees and refunds Application fees for sponsor licence applications and...
Taking part in strike action can be stressful enough. But for migrant workers who are sponsored by their employer, striking has also had the potential to place their immigration status in the UK at risk. This is because the Home Office’s position has been that unpaid absence from work due...
The High Court has ruled that failure to provide a medical assessment within 24 hours of arrival at a detention centre can make continued detention unlawful. In R (KG) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWHC 1767 (Admin) the court found that the Home Office had failed...
The Immigration Rules provide that somebody who wishes to stay in the UK on the basis of their family ties but does not otherwise meet the requirements of Appendix FM can argue that there are “exceptional circumstances”. Paragraph GEN.3.2.(2) says that: …the decision-maker must consider, on the basis of the information...
In two recently decided cases, the High Court looked at the relationship between immigration matters and proceedings in the family court. That is about as far as it goes in terms of a unifying theme, if I’m honest: the uncontroversial proposition in each one is that the immigration and family...
New figures from the Home Office show that hundreds of British citizens have unlawfully had their citizenship nullified since 2013. A Freedom of Information request by the author revealed that there were 262 decisions to nullify British citizenship between 2007 and 2017, peaking at 176 cases in 2013. In December...
Campaign group the3million, which lobbies for the rights of EU citizens in the UK after Brexit, has published a legal analysis of the settlement scheme those citizens will soon have to apply for. The group says that the government’s proposal, as set out in a statement of intent last month,...
The Home Office now believes that the Sudanese country guidance cases should no longer be followed, based on a change of country circumstances. Its “lines to take” now argue that while non-Arabs are likely to be at risk in the Darfur region, not all are at risk in the capital...
The Court of Justice of the European Union has taken a strict approach to time limits on take back requests imposed by the Dublin III Regulation. In case C‑213/17 X v Staatssecretaris van Veiligheid en Justitie, the court ruled that Italy had responsibility for considering an asylum claim even though...
Perhaps it’s the Donald Trump effect? The government yesterday announced two policy changes that should benefit migrants in the UK, just as the famously anti-immigrant reality TV host President of the United States was landing at Stansted airport. First, legal aid is to be restored for lone child migrants. Justice...
Afzal v East London Pizza Ltd (t/a Dominos Pizza) (Rev 1) [2018] UKEAT 0265_17_1304 is a decision of the Employment Appeal Tribunal. It touches on the vexed issue of an employee continuing to work while awaiting a decision from the Home Office on an immigration application. From an immigration law...
The chief inspector of prisons has attacked the Home Office for its “unacceptable” failure to respond to his reports on immigration detention centres. Peter Clarke, writing in the annual report of HM Inspectorate of Prisons, said that only half the action plans supposed to be drawn up had been sent...
Two years after the referendum vote to leave the European Union, the government has published a White Paper describing what it wants from the future relationship between the UK and EU. The 100-page document includes some references to the future of immigration from the EU, but only in certain, limited...
The latest, and presumably last, amendments to the EEA Regulations were laid before Parliament on 3 July 2018. The Immigration (European Economic Area) (Amendment) Regulations 2018 (SI 2018 No. 801) will come into force on 24 July 2018. Implementing a number of cases decided by the Court of Justice of...
The right of free movement for EU migrants could be replaced with something more like the arrangements making travel easier for Canadian business people, the Home Secretary has said. Sajid Javid told the Home Affairs committee of MPs today that free movement will end after Brexit, “full stop”, and repeatedly...
Another shot fired in the ongoing skirmishes between judges, perhaps starting to feel some of the workload pressure that legal aid lawyers have been labouring under for years, and immigration practitioners. Last week a JUSTICE report ominously recommended “greater use of the Hamid procedure”, a hearing convened to haul practitioners...
The Upper Tribunal does not take kindly to the assertion that it operates “unwritten rules”, as was argued in the recent case of SS (Sri Lanka) [2018] EWCA Civ 1391. The points before the court related to delay in promulgating a decision where credibility is in issue and whether a...
The new case of R (QR (Pakistan)) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 1413 is yet another example of fallout from last year’s Supreme Court judgment in Kiarie and Byndloss, relating to the infamous “deport first, appeal later” policy. The QR judgment itself doesn’t give...
A quick note on an unsuccessful challenge to a good character naturalisation refusal. The claimant sought to argue that the policy of refusing citizenship on the ground of bad character where the person had broken immigration laws in the preceding decade was ultra vires the British Nationality Act 1981. The...
In Teh v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWHC 1586 (Admin) the High Court has found that a British Overseas Citizen (BOC) can be stateless under the Immigration Rules if he or she has no other nationality. This is an interesting and pragmatic finding which highlights the...
Welcome to the May 2018 edition of the Free Movement immigration update podcast. It was a bumper month for immigration and asylum law updates, with 61 posts published on Free Movement in May. I can’t possibly cover everything, but the highlights include an important High Court intervention on automatic detention...
As regular readers of this blog will be aware, the Home Office’s latest statement of changes to the Immigration Rules comes into force tomorrow (Friday 6 July 2018). Nath has summarised the various changes being introduced in a previous post. Although a relatively small part of a fairly lengthy statement...
Home Office profit on the fees charged to children exercising their right to British citizenship comes to nearly £100 million over the past five years, Free Movement analysis has shown. The controversially high fee for the citizenship process known as registration — set this year at £1,012 — is far...
In R (Gedi) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2016] EWCA Civ 409 the Court of Appeal reversed a High Court decision that the words “restriction as to residence” in paragraph 2(5) of Schedule 3 to the Immigration Act 1971 empowered the Secretary of State to impose a...
The human rights and law reform organisation JUSTICE has launched a new report on the immigration asylum appeals system, saying that the tribunals have “become relatively complex and slow in parts of their operation, and overburdened by paper and unnecessary bureaucracy”. A working party chaired by Professor Sir Ross Cranston...
