All Articles: Cases

The Court of Appeal has issued a welcome corrective to the tribunals, telling them not to impose an “unrealistic evidential burden” on asylum applicants who claim that they are subject to monitoring by their home government. The case is MH (Bangladesh) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025]...

13th June 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

An appellant who is a Yemeni national who has lived in China since he was one year old has lost his appeal against the refusal of humanitarian protection on the grounds that he can return to China, despite the absence of evidence that China would grant him entry. The court...

11th June 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The Court of Appeal has upheld a decision by the Home Office to refuse a certificate of travel to a woman granted leave to remain on family grounds following an unsuccessful asylum claim. The claimant in R (KH) v The Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025] EWCA Civ...

6th June 2025
BY Alex Piletska

The Court of Appeal has found that an error by the Upper Tribunal in failing to place a relevant document before the decision making judge brought the case within the very limited exceptions for a Cart judicial review to proceed. The substantive challenge, however, was dismissed. The case is R...

4th June 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The High Court in R (TJ Trading Express Limited) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025] EWHC 1274 (Admin) held that before revoking the sponsor’s licence for non-compliance, the Home Office should have given the business an opportunity to make representations in response to its allegations. Background The...

3rd June 2025
BY Alex Piletska

The Court of Appeal has once again asked the Home Office to please do something about the state of Appendix EU. The context this time was trying to understand what the rules say about the definition of a durable partner. The case is Mustaj v Secretary of State for the...

29th May 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The Supreme Court has upheld a decision of the Court of Appeal, which had agreed with the Special Immigration Appeals Commission’s decision to dismiss an appeal against deprivation of British citizenship and an application for entry clearance by a woman in Syria. The case is U3 v Secretary of State...

21st May 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

An unhappy Court of Appeal has warned against the “the type of informal case expansion that was deprecated by this Court in R (Talpada) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 841” and reminded litigants of the need to make formal applications when wanting to amend...

20th May 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The Court of Appeal has upheld a decision of the Upper Tribunal to allow the Home Secretary’s appeal against a First-tier Tribunal decision allowing the appeal of a Vietnamese national on humanitarian protection grounds. The court held that the First-tier Tribunal had not given sufficient reasons for finding the appellant...

19th May 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The Home Secretary has had an absolute howler in the Upper Tribunal, it is one of those decisions that is worth a read in full if you have the time. It is a successful judicial review challenging a refusal to recognise further submissions as amounting to a fresh claim. This...

8th May 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The Court of Appeal has considered in Ackom v SSHD [2025] EWCA Civ 537 an appeal by a German national against deportation. The key point of contention was whether Mr Ackom would face ‘very significant obstacles to integration’ upon removal to Germany. The court considered the Kamara test in the...

7th May 2025
BY Nick Nason

The Court of Appeal has dismissed an appeal by an Albanian women in a protection claim where she initially succeeded in the First-tier Tribunal but that decision was later overturned by the Upper Tribunal. Her asylum claim was based on a risk on return from former clients of her husband’s...

2nd May 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

Asylum Aid’s legal challenge to the lawfulness of the statelessness family reunion rules has been comprehensively upheld. The judgement was handed down by the High Court on 14 February and has not been appealed. The case is Asylum Aid v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025] EWHC 316...

28th April 2025
BY Djamilla Hitchins

A Sudanese refugee has succeeded in challenging a negative trafficking decision after he was wrongly criticised for a lack of detail and supporting evidence for his claim. The case is R (Alnoor) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025] EWHC 922 (Admin). Background The claimant is a Sudanese...

23rd April 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The Court of Appeal has rejected a student’s argument that the Home Secretary should have exercised discretion and considered his application to switch into the skilled worker route, instead of rejecting it for not meeting the validity requirements after a rule change came into force prohibiting such a move. The...

15th April 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The Home Secretary has made a useful concession to the High Court, confirming that she has a discretion to grant indefinite leave to remain outside the immigration rules without a fee being paid. The child claimant in the case successfully challenged the rejection of his application for indefinite leave to...

11th April 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The Court of Appeal has given some guidance on the application of the exceptional assurance policy put in place during the pandemic and has concluded that it could not be relied on by the appellant, notwithstanding the fact that the Home Office had issued him with a letter granting a...

4th April 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

A Somali man who is at risk of harm from the Islamist Al-Shabaab group in his home area is not a refugee or entitled to humanitarian protection because he can reasonably relocate to Mogadishu. This is the decision of the Court of Appeal in ASJ (Somalia) v Secretary of State...

3rd April 2025
BY Keelin McCarthy

The Court of Appeal has dismissed an appeal against a decision by the Upper Tribunal that the First-tier Tribunal did not have jurisdiction to consider an appeal based on a grant of humanitarian protection that had not been made by the Home Secretary, on the grounds of a nationality that...

1st April 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

In R(AH) v Secretary of State for the Home Department, the Home Office has conceded that it wrongly excluded a Dutch man from re-entering the UK after a family holiday because it mistook him for a different Dutch national who had been deported from the UK. After proceedings were issued...

31st March 2025
BY Alex Schymyck

The Court of Appeal has held that the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) was entitled to decide that it would not be unjust to refuse to allow a woman in a refugee camp in Syria to lodge a late appeal against the Home Office’s decision depriving her of her British...

28th March 2025
BY Iain Halliday

“Although I have considerable sympathy for Mr Tomlinson, we are unable to wind back the clock so as to put right the historic injustice”. This quote perfectly summarises the bittersweet victory for the appellant in the recent Court of Appeal case of R (Tomlinson) v Secretary of State for the...

26th March 2025
BY Francesca Sella

In a decision on asylum support last year, the judge invited the Home Secretary to apply for judicial review of the tribunal so that guidance could be provided to asylum support judges on jurisdiction in implicit withdrawal cases (i.e. where the Home Office has deemed an asylum claim withdrawn). The...

25th March 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The Home Secretary has been only partially successful in the Court of Appeal in relation to Medical Justice’s challenge to the introduction of a policy allowing caseworkers to refer medical evidence for a second opinion from the Home Office’s medical staff where they believed that standards were not being met....

24th March 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The Court of Appeal confirmed in Prestwick Care Ltd & Ors, R (On the Application Of) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025] EWCA Civ 184 that the Home Office is not under a duty to carry out an assessment of the impact of sponsor licence revocation. The...

20th March 2025
BY Jack Freeland

Three individual claimants have succeeded in a judicial review claiming that they had been unlawfully accommodated at the former RAF base in Wethersfield. The court also held that the Home Office had unlawfully breached the Public Sector Equality Duty. The case is TG & Ors v Secretary of State for...

19th March 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The Home Secretary has succeeded in an appeal where she argued that those with deportation orders or proceedings were lawfully excluded from a concession allowing certain victims of trafficking to be considered for discretionary leave under the more favourable provisions in place before 30 January 2023. The case is Secretary...

18th March 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

A claimant seeking compensation under the Windrush Compensation Scheme after being denied entry to the UK and removed from the UK in July 1999 will have his application reconsidered after the High Court quashed the Home Office’s refusal. The case is R (Lee) v Secretary of State for the Home...

13th March 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

In the recent case of Butt v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025] EWCA Civ 189, the Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal against the refusal of an application for leave to remain as a spouse by a person who was in the UK as an overstayer. In...

12th March 2025
BY Rachael Lenney

The High Court has quashed a decision by the Home Office to refuse a trafficking claim on the grounds that the person had been kidnapped, which the decision maker said could not meet the trafficking definition. The case is R (AAM) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025]...

6th March 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

In two joined appeals, the Supreme Court has held that a successful challenge to a deprivation decision will mean that British citizenship was retained throughout the period from the date the deprivation order was made until the date of the appeal decision, but the effect of the deprivation order will...

3rd March 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The Court of Appeal has returned an appeal to the First-tier Tribunal to be determined for a third time after a series of errors made in a First-tier Tribunal decision was not dealt with by the Upper Tribunal. The court was clearly unimpressed, stating that “If the UT had carried...

28th February 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The High Court has ruled that three Home Office decisions, each of which refused the claimant’s request for reinstated trafficking support via the Modern Slavery Victim Care Contract, were unlawful. Judgment was handed down in R (ETX) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025] EWHC 294 (Admin) on...

27th February 2025
BY Bryony Goodesmith

On 7 February the High Court gave judgment in the case of R (oao) APD v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025] EWHC 246 (Admin). This was the first judicial treatment of section 4L of the British Nationality Act 1981, which was inserted by the Nationality and Borders...

26th February 2025
BY Alexander Finch

In our latest write up on the people seeking asylum who were on Diego Garcia there was mention of the case of KP, who was excluded from the arrangements to bring most people to the UK as he had criminal convictions, although he had also been recognised as being in...

25th February 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The Home Secretary has succeeded in an appeal to the Court of Appeal where the First-tier Tribunal’s decision was overturned for a failure to provide sufficient reasons for departing from a country guidance case, only for the Upper Tribunal to then fall into the same error. The case is Secretary...

21st February 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

Emotions can run high in any litigation. In a case arising from unlawful detention, like Mlundira v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025] EWHC 189 (KB), the stakes and emotions can be heightened. This case underlines how important it is to consider and respond to correspondence from the...

18th February 2025
BY James Packer

The Upper Tribunal has recently dismissed a judicial review action involving a Turkish Kurdish family who were separated when attempting to cross the Channel. Before you continue reading this, I would recommend reading Colin’s excellent article on the interim order decision by the Court of Appeal, where he sets out...

17th February 2025
BY Francesca Sella

The High Court has dismissed an appeal by the Home Secretary against an award of damages to a refugee in the amount of £98,757.04 in respect of her unlawful detention and breach of article 8 relating to the delay in granting her status. The case is Secretary of State for...

11th February 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The Court of Appeal has allowed the Home Secretary’s appeal in a deprivation case involving the use of a false identity, but the appeal will now return to the Upper Tribunal which had not considered the article 8 rights of the appellant. This is the third of the recent appeals...

7th February 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

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