All Articles: Blog news

The software behind the blog has gotten a little out of hand and beyond my meagre self taught technical skills, so I have needed to buy in some help. Following a health check by the very nice people at The Small Axe, I myself made a few technical chan ...

As some blog readers will know from my Twitter account and others may have deduced from the sudden absence of branding on the blog, I have moved from Renaissance Chambers. I am now a tenant of Garden Court Chambers. ...

More observant visitors to the blog will notice that there have been a few changes, as trailed a couple of weeks ago. These are mainly visual so far, but the metered access will follow in the next couple of weeks as will some new forum software and ch ...

There will be some changes coming to the blog in the near future. No-one seems to like change, so I thought I would run these past everyone first. Some ideas are pretty minor cosmetic tweaks, others much more fundamental. I’ll start with what is ...

It looked for a while like banning this blog was all the rage. First there was some discussion on Twitter on which websites are banned within immigration detention centres, then the immigration tribunal presidents had a go as well. What are "proh ...

It was with a mixture of pride and regret that I heard that last week immigration judges were explicitly and specifically instructed not to join the Free Movement forum by the two Presidents of the Immigration and Asylum Chambers. It is nice to know t ...

The Free Movement Forum will, I hope, be an essential resource and outlet for immigration lawyers. Joining is also, of course, a good way to support the blog and the work that has goes into it if you value that and find it useful. The launch seems to ...

The Free Movement forum launches today. It is intended to be a private, progressive space in which immigration lawyers, campaigners, academics, students and select others can help one another and discuss any or all immigration, asylum, nationality and ...

Continuing in the spirit of innovation, the Free Movement legal forum will, all being well, launch next week. I’m seeking comments or feedback on the idea now before it goes live. A Join the forum introductory page has been added to the menu bar ...

With an unhealthy mixture of surprise, embarrassment and pride (emphasis on surprise, I think) we can announce that the Renaissance Chambers Immigration Team has been shortlisted for the Award for Innovation – The Bar at the Halsbury Legal Award ...

I am planning some changes to the blog in the next week or so. This may lead to some down time and/or a very funny looking blog for a while. Hopefully a short while. Firstly, I need to mess around with and change the theme as it seems to be doing a fe ...

I have collected together all the blog posts for 2012 into an ebook, which is now available on the Kindle store. By a surprising automated process, the blog posts were automatically sucked up by some sort of scary blog muncher website and then spat ou ...

First of all, some stats from the blog for 2012: 722,000 page views 2,000 page views per day on average 356,000 visitors 2 min 46 sec average visit duration 2 pages viewed per visit on average 149 new blog posts in 2012 (three per week) 21,500 unique ...

From its conception in 2007, the Free Movement blog has been about sharing information and ideas. When the blog first went live with an anonymous author and zero readership the ‘About’ page had this to say: All you need to know about me is ...

Human Rights Watch and a proxy terror front group -Freedom from Torture, clamored that the flights should be suspended because some ‘ethnic’ Tamils were subjected to cruel treatment in the island nation. This is what the Sri Lankan governm ...

Colin is now off on holiday for a fortnight so updates will be even slower than the last fortnight. There are a couple of posts in the pipeline, though, and there is likely to be a flurry of catching up activity on his return. They keys to the blog Tw ...

We at Renaissance are appalled at the witch hunt of Upper Tribunal Judges who have had the audacity to allow a criminal deportation appeal. As those on the coal face know, winning a criminal deportation appeal is no walk in the park and at first insta ...

Free Movement will be on light to non-existent blogging and Tweeting duties for the next fortnight or so owing to the birth on Monday of baby Annabel, sister to Alec. All is well but blogging is not top of FM’s to-do list at the moment. ...

Yet again I missed the blog’s birthday, which was 7 March. Unbelievably (for so, so many reasons) the blog has now been going for over five years. In that time it has clocked up roughly 1,346,037 hits, 521 posts and 2,608 comments between the ol ...

Free Movement entirely retracts the article that was previously published here regarding the Chapti case and apologises to those involved. The comments in the article went considerably beyond fair, were unreasonably speculative and were misleading as ...

Got a Kindle for Christmas? Wondering what to do with it now you’ve read the first couple of chapters of Great Expectations and then swiftly moved on to some Sherlock Holmes? You can now subscribe to Free Movement on your Kindle: while away yo ...

Regular visitors to the website will have noticed some changes over the Christmas period. A second column has been introduced on the right with Renaissance Chambers and HJT Training information, with both of which the editor is personally associated. ...

The blog has been experiencing a few problems over the last few days, for which I apologise. The hosting provider moved the blog to a new server accidentally or some such, and everything went offline for about a day. Somewhere along the way some conte ...

[UPDATE: now done, as you can see!] I have more or less finished building the new website and plan to switch over shortly. Before I do so I thought it might be helpful for readers to check it out and get back to me with any comments or suggestions and ...

There will be some changes coming on Free Movement. This has been absorbing quite a lot of my rather limited time of late, and there are several significant recent cases that I haven’t managed to flag up yet, for which I apologise. Work has been ext ...

Passing through immigration control on my return to the UK yesterday, my wife had to restrain me from taking a photograph of one of the notices that appeared on the UK visual displays at Heathrow. She wanted to get home sooner rather than later and, o ...

I’m off on holiday and am delighted to say that I won’t be back for three weeks. I’d hoped to set a couple of posts to pop up automatically while I’m away but I’ve been too busy packing. See you in a few weeks. ...

Free Movement has just hit one MILLION, er, hits. As with Dr Evil, that isn’t actually a lot of hits in today’s world, but for a small, specialist legal blog it isn’t bad going. Time for some reminiscing… The first post was on ...

It is now possible to claim CPD (Continuing Professional Development) points through the blog, in conjunction with HJT Training. The poll a couple of weeks ago suggested that there is a reasonable level of interest in this, so we’ve put togethe ...

Free Movement is planning to launch a scheme to allow regular readers who are barristers, solicitors or OISC advisers to claim some CPD hours by reading the blog and then answering multiple choice questions. This would be done in conjunction with HJT ...

BAILII, the invaluable resource which provides much of the material for this blog, is under threat of closure. It seems that the Ministry of Justice has withdrawn funding, and BAILII are seeking replacement commitments from solicitors firms and barris ...

It had escaped my attention that Free Movement was four years old on 7 March 2011. The first ever post was published on that day, entitled Overstayers and illegal entrants. The Home Secretary was Dr Reid. How long ago that all feels! Since then 365 po ...

Only this morning I was making extensive use of the websites of both the First Tier and Upper Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chambers. I’ve returned to chambers only to find that they have now seemingly vanished into thin air, with nothing but ...

After a grand total of 50 votes, 74% of which were in favour of the new look, the new look is duly adopted. The four of you who hate the new look so much you plan to set up yet further ‘free movement’ immigration blog and update sites, goo ...

As some may have noticed, I’ve made a few minor changes to the blog in the last few days. I’ve added new pages about instructing the barristers here at Renaissance Chambers, both for solicitors and members of the public, and about contribu ...

I gave a short presentation this morning to John Vine, the Chief Inspector of UKBA. I thought I’d share it with you. It lacks a certain something without my narration, I feel, but it at least gives you the gist. The presentation was based on ILP ...