Hundreds of refugee children denied reunion with family in the UK may be able to challenge that decision following a ruling that Home Office policy on “Dublin III” transfers is in part unlawful. The case is R (Safe Passage International) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2021] EWHC...
“Illegal immigration to be turned into a criminal offence in landmark borders bill”, the Sunday Express reports. The idea that unauthorised immigration is insufficiently criminalised will surprise legislators who have spent much of the past two decades piling dozens and dozens of new immigration offences onto the statute books. “Illegal...
The Court of Appeal has ruled that an immigration tribunal is not obliged to accept the conclusions of an expert witness. The case of MS (Zimbabwe) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2021] EWCA Civ 941 confirms that a tribunal is required to reach its own conclusions. In...
The High Court has overturned a tribunal judgment that had instructed the Home Office to house refused asylum seekers until lockdown restrictions end. The decision in R (Secretary of State for the Home Department) v First-tier Tribunal (Social Entitlement Chamber) [2021] EWHC 1690 (Admin) is said to affect at least 1,000...
No matter how devastating may be epidemic, natural disaster or famine, a person fleeing them is not a refugee within the terms of the Convention. A v Minister for Immigration & Ethnic Affairs [1997] HCA 4 (Aus HC) As the High Court of Australia highlights in the quote above, there...
Copy: Refugee Week 2020Infogram This week is Refugee Week. From 14-20 June 2021, the UK celebrates the contribution of refugees and promotes better understanding of why people seek sanctuary. The infographic above draws on government figures to illustrate some trends in asylum in the UK. Most of the data comes...
A recent technical error cutting countless asylum seekers off from their already-meagre support payments of £39.63 a week has shed light on the difficulties those applying for asylum face in meeting their basic needs while their claims are being considered. The payment problems – estimated to affect around one third...
The High Court has condemned the treatment of asylum seekers crammed into a former military barracks in Kent. In a judgment laying bare the vile conditions at Napier barracks, Mr Justice Linden found that the site did not meet minimum legal standards for asylum accommodation; nor did the process for...
The High Court has declared that an anomaly in the benefits system which disadvantages victims of trafficking who receive asylum support is discriminatory and in breach of Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Unusually, the Secretary of State confessed to the court that she was not sure...
Priti Patel’s announcement of her “New Plan for Immigration” left many of us wondering what semblance of planning had gone into the proposals. The consultation that closed on 6 May raises similar questions given the misleading format of the survey, the short response timeframe and the lack of engagement with...
Note: this article refers to the position prior to the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, see here for the current position. On 13 May 2021, my client Fouad Kakaei was unanimously acquitted of assisting unlawful immigration at his retrial following a successful appeal against conviction, the reporting restriction for which...
Fouad Kakaei is an Iranian man who helped steer small boats carrying asylum seekers across the English Channel on two separate occasions, in July and December 2019. He also attempted to cross on several other occasions. Following the July 2019 crossing, he did not claim asylum here in the UK...
Readers may be forgiven for thinking that, where the Family Court finds that a person is at risk of female genital mutilation and makes a Female Genital Mutilation Protection Order (FGMPO), it will feed into the asylum consideration process. Not so. Or, perhaps more accurately, not necessarily so. It all...
The Home Office’s compartmentalised approach to applications for permission to stay in the UK can sometimes cause problems. Not everyone’s claim fits neatly into pre-defined categories. So what happens when there is overlap between, for instance, an asylum claim and a human rights claim? This is the issue considered by the...
The Upper Tribunal has declared the government’s strict policy on asylum seekers working to be unlawful because it doesn’t mention that exceptions can be made. The case is R (C6) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (asylum seekers’ permission to work) [2021] UKUT 94 (IAC). We originally published...
The European Court of Human Rights in K.I. v France (application no. 5560/19) has re-affirmed that refugee status is declaratory and revocation of a person’s refugee status under French and EU law does not prevent that person from continuing to be a refugee under the Refugee Convention. Authorities revoking someone’s...
When someone says that refugees should claim asylum in the first safe country they reach, what they really mean is that other countries should look after refugees. They want others to do what they would not do themselves. Their words are really addressed to the countries through which the refugee...
There is a lot that is familiar in the New Plan for Immigration. The government argues that its proposals are “firm but fair”, language eerily reminiscent of a 1998 Blair-era white paper entitled Fairer, Faster and Firmer. One thing that is new is the proposal that many of those who...
Today the Home Office published a new plan for immigration with the title, somehow both grandiloquent and banal, New Plan for Immigration. It is mainly concerned with asylum and people who enter the UK illegally (those two concepts being subtly mashed together) but there are also some miscellaneous proposals for...
We’ve seen a constant drip of leaks about the UK’s “broken” asylum system and how the upcoming Borders Bill or Sovereign Borders Bill or New Plan For Immigration or whatever it’s called will be the “biggest overhaul of the asylum system in a generation”. A lot of this is cover...
With a recent inspection revealing the squalor in which refugees are housed when they reach the United Kingdom, the ensuing closure of Penally barracks but the continued operation of Napier, and yet more deterrent policies being trailed this morning, I thought I would share some thoughts from my book Welcome...
Barred from working and mainstream benefits, for many in the asylum system their only option for money and shelter is by requesting support from the Home Office. A year into the pandemic, the asylum support system has seen significant changes. This article tries to outline just a few of the...
Whether or not a person is telling the truth about past events often becomes the central issue in many asylum claims. Sometimes this is appropriate. The question of whether an asylum seeker will face a real risk of being persecuted in future does in some cases turn on the truth...
In CM v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2021] CSIH 15, the Inner House overturned previous findings that a person who witnessed a state murder in their home country was not in danger because they had not (and would not) report the matter to the authorities there. The...
When I first stepped into the field of statelessness as a practitioner, I expected it to be complex. With a background in asylum and anti-trafficking casework, I was familiar with nationality disputes and the challenges facing those affected. But I did not expect that the legal and human complexity of...
The Home Office breached the human rights of a refused asylum seeker by evicting him while his eighth attempt to reopen his asylum claim was still pending, the High Court of Northern Ireland has found. The case is Re Omar Mahmud [2021] NIQB 6. Background Mr Mahmud, 42, is a...
The Upper Tribunal in QC (verification of documents; Mibanga duty) China [2021] UKUT 33 (IAC) has given useful guidance on how to approach documentary evidence submitted by asylum appellants. The tribunal has also clarified the circumstances in which Home Office must make enquiries to verify an appellant’s documentary evidence before...
Since 1 January 2021 people seeking asylum in Europe, be they adults or children, have been far less likely to reunite with their family in the UK. A vital legal route has been closed, as the Brexit transition period has come to end and the Dublin III Regulation can no...
A High Court judge has raised the prospect of contempt of court proceedings against the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, after her department breached a mandatory injunction. Mr Justice Chamberlain made the ominous comments in the case of Mohammad v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2021] EWHC 240 (Admin). ...
In the latest round of the legal saga involving Egyptian dissident Yasser Al-Siri, the Court of Appeal has ruled that the Home Office acted unlawfully in only granting him restricted leave to remain after an earlier First-tier Tribunal decision that he is a refugee. There was, the court found, no...
In the case of C-255/19 Secretary of State for the Home Department v OA, the Court of Justice of the European Union held (at paragraph 64) that: 1. Article 11(1)(e) of Council Directive 2004/83/EC of 29 April 2004 on minimum standards for the qualification and status of third country nationals...
A Palestinian refugee threatening to take his own life in a dispute over the age recorded on his residence permit has lost a judicial review at the Court of Appeal. The case is (WA (Palestinian Territories)) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2021] EWCA Civ 12. Background The...
How serious must a person’s “extremism” be to justify exclusion from the Refugee Convention? Three years ago, the Court of Appeal in Youssef & N2 v Secretary of State for the Home Department lowered the bar for exclusion from the Convention’s protection by disqualifying an asylum seeker for “general” promotion of...
The government has introduced important new rules on the handling of claims for asylum with effect from 1 January 2021. Guidance for Home Office asylum caseworkers was published the day before, on 31 December, fleshing out some of the operational details. What is not in the policy document is as...
The Court of Appeal has handed down a major judgment on the correct approach to assessing whether a person is a victim of trafficking: MN v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2020] EWCA Civ 1746. Although this was the central question in the case and huge resources were...
Home Office policy on permission to work for asylum seekers is unlawful to the extent that it doesn’t make allowances for potential victims of human trafficking, the High Court held today. The policy will now have to be reworked to make clear that there is a discretion to allow asylum...
Much has changed about the way asylum appeals in the First-tier Tribunal operate this year. But research spanning 2013 to 2019 indicates that a reliably fair and effective asylum appeal system was some way off even before the pandemic hit. Today the University of Exeter and Public Law Project released...
The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, has today released a new report auditing the Home Office’s procedure for deciding statelessness applications. The audit finds that there is considerable room for improvement in how the UK processes applications to stay in the UK by people who are not considered as nationals...
