All Articles: Blog news
Blog technical tweaks
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 ...
3rd September 2013Blog changes ahead including possible paywall
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 ...
9th July 2013Access to the internet at immigration detention centres
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 ...
11th April 2013Free Movement Forum Banned!
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 ...
20th March 2013Forum and other blog news
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 ...
11th March 2013Forum opens today
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 ...
4th March 2013Free Movement forum coming soon
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 ...
27th February 2013Halsbury Legal Awards 2013
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 ...
25th February 2013Blog changes ahead
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 ...
20th January 2013Free Movement 2012 ebook
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 ...
16th January 2013Year in review
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 ...
28th December 2012Blog developments
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 ...
12th October 2012Freedom from Torture: A risk category in itself?
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 ...
17th September 2012Must be doing something right
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 ...
17th July 2012Interruption to normal service…
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. ...
13th June 2012Happy Fifth Birthday!
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 ...
25th April 2012Going for Glory: Part 2
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 ...
6th February 2012Fundraising
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 ...
24th January 2012Blog changes
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. ...
8th January 2012Blog problems
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 ...
10th December 2011Change of website address
[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 ...
27th November 2011Blog changes ahead
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 ...
14th November 2011Immigration control
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 ...
26th September 2011Free Movement is away
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. ...
5th September 2011One MILLION hits!
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 ...
23rd August 2011Claim CPD hours through the blog
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 ...
3rd August 2011CPD hours through Free Movement
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 ...
14th July 2011BAILII fundraising
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 ...
17th June 2011Happy Birthday!
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 ...
7th April 2011Immigration tribunal websites vanish
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 ...
4th April 2011Litigation, the law and UKBA
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 ...
18th January 2011