The Court of Appeal has re-visited the proper approach to deciding whether fresh asylum claims meet the rule 353 test. The case is R (on the application of YH) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2010] EWCA Civ 116 and it effectively superse ...

Mr Justice Collins has given a scathing judgment in a grant of permission to a judicial review challenge to the practice of the Home Office’s Third Country Unit (TCU) in detaining and removing children to supposedly safe third countries such as ...

There were developments last week in the world of third country removal cases, and now seems like a good moment to review the current position. The Dublin II Regulation (not its official title) enables EU states to return an asylum seeker to the count ...

Claims have emerged from a UKBA staff member previously based at Cardiff that her colleagues were abusive to asylum seekers both to their faces and behind their backs when discussing their applications. The claims are detailed, specific and plausible. ...

Just a quick warning to practitioners. There have been a small number of examples recently of UKBA granting five years’ status to children recognised as refugees on the basis of their membership of a particular social group based on their age, b ...

The case of TK (Tamils, LP updated) Sri Lanka CG [2009] UKAIT 00049 is next on the carousel. As can be seen from the title, it deals with the current situation on the ground in Sri Lanka since the military defeat of the LTTE in May 2009. The country ...

My my, one gets more comments on The Guardian website than on Free Movement! I’ve been busy in court all day (on a non immigration case) and get back to find that there were 87 comments on the short piece I’ve done for Liberty Central at T ...

UPDATE: see this judgment. There have been some interesting developments on permission to work for Legacy asylum seekers. Click here for the Story So Far. I read in some stakeholder minutes recently that UKBA thought it had only be judicially reviewed ...

In the recent case of MS and others (family reunion: “in order to seek asylum”) Somalia [2009] UKAIT 00041 the tribunal looked at the refugee family reunion rules and came to the slightly surprising conclusion that not all refugees have th ...

In an unusually dramatic move, the Presenting Officer in the recent case of KB (para: 320(7A): “false representations”) Albania [2009] UKAIT 00043 served a section 40 notice on a witness in the case, thereby depriving him of his British ci ...

News just in: Mr Justice Davis sitting in the High Court has ordered the Home Office to disclose ‘details of the route and destination’ of a proposed removals flight to Iraq. Rumours about this charter flight have been flying and the Home ...

It appears that UKBA have genuinely gone nuts. From tomorrow, 14 October 2009, they are requiring that any further submissions in an asylum case must be made in person by appointment. At the same time UKBA is now requiring that all initial claims for ...

I thought it was high time for a general advice post, as it’s been a while since the last one. This one is about fresh claims for asylum. A failed asylum seeker can apply for asylum again; this is referred to as a ‘fresh claim’. By & ...

I’ve come across some interesting articles on ‘credibility’ through the Forced Migration Current Awareness Blog. This is an excellent blog which records various publications on all sorts of interesting subjects and effectively catalo ...

It has taken me a while to get around to posting on the House of Lords judgment in the Sudanese test case, SSHD v AH (Sudan) [2007] UKHL 49. This might be at least partly explained by my not wanting to have to post on it, as if this act of omission wo ...

A little too reminiscent of Cromwell’s New Model Army, perhaps, the New Asylum Model is supposed to herald a new age of high quality Home Office asylum decision making. The Home Office already seem to have stopped referring to it as being New ...

I’m still catching up on a few developments while I was away over Easter, and have just read the Court of Appeal case of AH (Sudan) and Others v SSHD [2007] EWCA Civ 297, which came out on 4 April 2007. This is yet another Country Guideline case ...

The Court of Appeal has yet again overturned the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal’s attempt definitively to establish whether a failed asylum seeker is at risk of ill-treatment by the Zimbabwe secret service at Harare airport following a forced ...