On 17 July 2023, a new statement of changes to the Immigration Rules was published. As usual, it is accompanied by an Explanatory Memorandum. Also as usual, it is largely concerned with cracking down on those perceived as abusing immigration law. Ther ...

The mantra of “safe and legal routes” is regularly repeated by the government when justifying increasingly draconian legislation in an attempt to prevent refugees from travelling to the UK under their own steam. The argument is that refugees shoul ...

The Home Secretary was entitled to refuse entry clearance to an Afghan interpreter accused of releasing sensitive information and threatening to kill coalition forces. That was the conclusion of the High Court in FMA and others v Secretary of State fo ...

This post reflects on last week’s extraordinary Court of Appeal judgment on the Rwanda policy. You can read our initial take on this here. Appeal to the Supreme Court The government has already announced its intention to seek leave to appeal to the ...

The majority of unaccompanied children who enter the UK to seek asylum do not bring with them evidence of their age. Because of this, the Home Office has a duty to carry out an initial assessment of their age to establish whether they are, or could be ...

The Supreme Court has held that there was no legal obligation to consider the equality impact of excluding Palestinians from the UK’s resettlement scheme for refugees from Syria. The design of the scheme was therefore lawful. The case is R (on the a ...

The Court of Appeal has found, by a majority, that the Rwanda plan is unlawful as Rwanda is not a sufficiently safe country. In short, the Rwandan authorities are not yet reliably able to sort genuine from non-genuine refugees, and therefore there is ...

Potential victims of trafficking awaiting asylum support decisions during the first lockdown were wrongly denied the full payments to which they were entitled. So held the High Court in R (on the application of PM) v Secretary of State for the Home De ...

The government yesterday published its economic impact assessment for the Illegal Migration Bill and its Rwanda plan. The assessment reveals that Rwanda will be paid approximately £105,000 per refugee received on top of the £120 million already ...

It has become fashionable for government ministers to refer to “bespoke” humanitarian schemes and such like, referring to programmes like those for Ukrainians and Hong Kongers. The illusory scheme for Afghans was once trumpeted as a “bespoke” ...

Over and over again we hear that refugees should claim asylum in the first safe country the reach. There are variations on the theme. Genuine refugees claim asylum in the first safe country. Refugees should or even must claim asylum in the first safe ...

Lawyers do not own the word “refugee”. The term has been in use since the eighteenth century and has its own evocative, wider meaning in the public consciousness. Those fleeing Ukraine or relocating to the United Kingdom from Hong Kong can ...

The High Court has decided it should not invoke its wardship jurisdiction in relation to missing and unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. In Article 39 v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2023] EWHC 1398 (Fam), Article 39, a charity promot ...

Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick today announced that the government was dropping its “differentiated status” approach to refugees, introduced less than one year ago as the centrepiece of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022. The policy ...

On 26 May, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) published a report ‘Asylum Screening in the UK: An audit of the UK’s asylum intake, registration and screening procedures and recommendations for change’ which identifies a number of p ...

Sunak gave a major speech this morning claiming that his “Stop The Boats” plan is working. Is it? There are some signs of success but it probably has nothing to do with the Illegal Migration Bill. Small boats It is true that small boat cro ...

The latest quarterly immigration statistics were published today. Most of the media focus is on net migration and the Office of National Statistics ONS report. Net migration turned out to be around 600,000 rather than the 700,000 or more that some had ...

Wednesday 10 May 2023 saw a few developments with the Illegal Migration Bill, as the second reading took place in the House of Lords, and the Equality Impact Assessment was published. We’ve summarised the key points below. House of Lords The most in ...

The Illegal Migration Bill, the government’s answer to the ‘small boats crisis’, was proposed to Parliament on 7 March. Since then, it has faced fierce criticism from international organisations including the UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHC ...

The government’s new Illegal Migration Bill is the latest in the long line of attempts to deal with refugee arrivals by making life difficult for them. In so doing, it sidesteps the real issues, the reality of both the facts of the refugee issue in ...

This week news broke about a row between Westminister and the Senedd regarding the inclusion of care leavers who arrived in the UK as unaccompanied children seeking asylum in their Universal Basic Income Pilot after a letter from a number of Welsh min ...

The government claims that refugees should use ‘safe and legal routes’ to come to the UK. This forms a crucial part of its rhetorical defence for the recently-introduced Illegal Migration Bill because the Bill will deny refugee protection in the U ...

The Illegal Migration Bill paints a picture of irresponsible refugees who seem to delight in travelling illegally to the UK in dangerous small boats. Its claim to prevent refugees travelling to the UK by these illegal and dangerous routes is a laudabl ...

The European Court of Human Rights has given formal notification to the UK government of an application by an Iraqi asylum-seeker (anonymised as NSK) challenging his removal to Rwanda. They also found that several of the Rule 39 interim measures to pr ...

The government is right that the asylum backlog needs to be urgently addressed, but the Illegal Migration Bill will not tackle the backlog in any meaningful sense and could cause devastating harm to the rights of some of the most persecuted people in ...

Will the Illegal Migration Bill breach the 1951 Refugee Convention, a global treaty to which the UK is party? The key point of contention in relation to this question is the Bill’s imposition of a blanket duty on the Home Office to remove to a “sa ...

As well as guidance for individuals receiving the new asylum questionnaires under the streamlined process, Refugee Action has produced guidance for unregulated or OISC Level 1 caseworkers, and guidance for asylum volunteers. The aim of these guides is ...

A new report by the international aid spending watchdog has revealed that the Home Office spent one third of the UK’s international aid budget on domestic asylum costs, leading to severe cuts to genuine international aid programmes. The Independent ...

Resources have been published by Refugee Action to assist those who have received one of the new asylum questionnaires under the Home Office’s streamlined process. You can read more in detail about what to do with the questionnaire, how to fill it i ...

The Home office has published new guidance introducing a streamlined process to deal with child asylum applications. The policy explained in the guidance apparently intends to help the Home Office fulfil the commitment made by Rishi Sunak to clear the ...

The short answer is that we do not know. But it is possible to make some informed guesses. In this post I try to do just that, based on a Twitter thread from a few days ago and some feedback from that. Evidence on refugee decision-making The evidence ...