The new innovator and start-up visas went live today. They replace the Tier 1 (Entrepreneur) route which is now closed to new applicants, and the Tier 1 (Graduate Entrepreneur) route which will close from 6 July. All applicants for these visas must now have the endorsement of an organisation certifying...
The High Court has rejected a challenge to the £1 an hour pay rate for immigration detainees. Morita v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] EWHC 758 (Admin) is the culmination of a longstanding battle between Duncan Lewis and the Home Office about payment for immigration detainees who...
Assiduous Free Movement readers and European law aficionados may remember the case of SM (Algeria) v Entry Clearance Officer [2018] UKSC 9, covered in this previous post. The case has now gone from the Supreme Court to the Court of Justice of the European Union, which has held that although...
The Home Office has announced that seven Service and Support Centres are now open to cater for particularly complex immigration cases. Appointments are free, and “experienced UKVI staff will provide a face to face service and help people throughout their application”. The centres are located in Belfast, Cardiff, Croydon, Glasgow,...
Depending on which pundit you speak to, a no-deal Brexit has either got more likely or less likely over the last couple of weeks. It remains the default if the UK-EU withdrawal agreement is not passed at the third time of asking, and a further extension is not agreed by...
The Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into immigration detention has released its report which strongly censures “every part of the immigration detention system”. The inquiry was initially triggered in response to the BBC’s ‘Panorama’ programme which uncovered shocking abuse in Brook House immigration removal centre. Preceded by two reports from...
The settled status scheme for EU citizens to stay in the UK after Brexit is about to complete its last test phase and will be fully open on 30 March 2019. We have talked about how the Settlement Scheme operates here: How to apply for “settled status” for EU citizens....
Immigration judges who get things wrong tend not to be named, unless of course you are Dr Majid. All the more surprising, then, that the Court of Appeal sought to name (and, frankly, shame) Judge Anthony Thornton QC in R (Hameed) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019]...
In March 2018, the Home Office stunned the Turkish community by abolishing the route to settlement in the UK that had existed under the Ankara Agreement. It did issue replacement rules for Turkish businesspeople to get indefinite leave to remain a few months later, but these were more stringent than...
In R (Goloshvili) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] EWHC 614 (Admin), the High Court has found that enforcement of the “Right to Rent” scheme involves discrimination on the grounds of nationality, but it is lawful because of an exemption in the Equality Act 2010. This case...
The Court of Justice of the European Union has today handed down judgment in the case of C-163/17 Jawo. The court held that asylum seekers cannot be sent back even to a fellow EU member state if they are at substantial risk of inhuman or degrading treatment, but set the...
The Home Office amended its definition of a ‘professional sportsperson’ back in January 2019. At the time, I set out why I thought the changes were significant: Why coaching your kid’s football team could breach your visa conditions. Since then, a number of universities and other organisations have also expressed...
In Case C‑557/17 Staatssecretaris van Veiligheid en Justitie v Y.Z. and Others, the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that EU law permits the revocation of falsely obtained family reunion residence permits, even when the individual did not know about the deception, but that such decisions must...
The Court of Appeal has rejected a challenge that the time limit for bringing an administrative review only starts when a decision is physically received by an applicant. The appellant in R (Hasan) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] EWCA Civ 389 tried to argue that the words...
On 14 March the High Court suspended the Home Office’s removals policy. The decision means that the system of giving migrants “removal windows” within which they can be removed from the UK without warning will be halted for the time being. Mr Justice Walker, in a case brought by the...
The government announced on 7 March that two new immigration categories will appear in the Immigration Rules from 29 March 2019 — the innovator and start-up visas. Since then, immigration lawyers and prospective applicants up and down the land have been eagerly waiting to see who the endorsing bodies will...
Welcome to the February 2019 edition of the Free Movement immigration update podcast. This month we start with a quick discussion of deprivation of citizenship in the context of the Shamima Begum case before tackling some of the case law on asylum (in particular Sri Lanka for some reason). Then...
Hard on the heels of one legal aid climb-down by the Lord Chancellor comes another. The government has conceded that legal aid lawyers can be paid for their work on a judicial review case where the decision being challenged is withdrawn while an oral permission hearing is pending. Legal aid...
The government has announced some changes to the immigration system to give the impression that the UK is a welcoming and functioning country despite the ongoing chaos of Brexit. Chancellor Philip Hammond, giving a Spring Statement economic speech yesterday, said that PhD level jobs would be taken out of the...
KK (India) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] EWCA Civ 369 was an appeal against removal from the UK based on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The appellant argued that the Home Office had not given sufficient consideration to her Article 8 rights,...
The draft Immigration, Nationality and Asylum (EU Exit) Regulations 2019, laid before Parliament on 11 February, make major changes to the law on deportation of European Economic Area and Turkish citizens after Brexit. They will kick in on the date of Brexit, if there is no deal, or at the...
The Supreme Court has finally laid to rest the argument (advanced by me amongst others) that second or subsequent human rights or asylum claims automatically attract a right of appeal under the appeal regime of the Immigration Act 2014. They don’t, say their lordships. The meaning of “human rights claim”...
A visa application form filled in on a computer, printed off and posted to the Home Office is not an “online application”. That is probably no surprise to anyone but the appellant in R (Shah) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] EWCA Civ 368, who tried to...
The updated list of fees for immigration and nationality applications that apply from 29 March 2019 shows that most remain unchanged from this year. The amount the Home Office has been charging to process visa, settlement and citizenship applications has risen steadily above inflation for many years. This year, against...
A deportation case with a twist: R (Foley) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] EWHC 488 (Admin) involved an Irish citizen who requested deportation but was denied it. Fans of the genre may recall the Connell case that we covered on the blog last year. The judgments...
In a unanimous decision the Court of Appeal have allowed the appeal of an Ahmadi who was unable to demonstrate that his case fell within the relevant country guidance decision of MN and others (Ahmadis- country conditions- risk) Pakistan CG [2012] UKUT 389 (IAC). The case is WA (Pakistan) v...
The Court of Appeal has in the case of AS (Afghanistan) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] EWCA Civ 208 decided that the Upper Tribunal can correct a mistake made in the reasons for a determination. The court interprets Rule 42 of the procedure rules as affording this power,...
This is significant: the Immigration (European Economic Area Nationals) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019. The most important of the changes are to give non-EU extended family members of EU citizens a right of appeal against refusal of a family permit or residence card. The regulations also implement last summer’s Court of...
Welcome to the delayed January 2019 edition of the Free Movement immigration update podcast. We start the round-up with some mixed news on appeal rights before getting into the latest on Brexit and the Settlement Scheme for EU citizens living in the UK. There is some significant new guidance on...
A new statement of changes to the Immigration Rules was published today, 7 March 2019. It is 294 pages long and covers a lot of ground. The main changes are to Tier 1 entrepreneur and investment visas, and to the EU Settlement Scheme. This requires, inevitably, a new appendix to the...
The government has proposed the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration as the interim monitoring body for the EU citizen settled status scheme. This briefing examines the powers, remit and impact of the Chief Inspector. The Chief Inspector is a person — currently David Bolt and previously John Vine...
The Court of Appeal has ruled that the regulations on the detention of asylum seekers subject to the Dublin III removal procedure comply with EU law. Background: detaining migrants before return to another EU country The International Protection (Detention) (Significant Risk of Absconding Criteria) Regulations 2017 (SI 2017 No. 405)...
TT (Vietnam) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] EWCA Civ 248 is a human trafficking appeal. The Home Office accepted that TT was a victim of trafficking but nonetheless sought to deport him. Lord Justice Davis held that it is possible for the Secretary of State to...
The Supreme Court has had to remind the immigration tribunal that self inflicted torture by proxy (SIBP) is inherently unlikely. Self inflicted torture by proxy is the least worst phrase so far devised for describing the idea — and it really is just an idea, a figment of someone’s fevered...
