There has been a rush of cases in recent weeks on the subject of the Refugee Convention exclusion clauses. The exclusion clauses basically exclude some people from refugee status. In reality, human rights law has evolved to prevent removal if there is a well founded fear in such cases, but...
Odelola v SSHD has been dismissed in the House of Lords. The immigration rules that apply to a decision are those at the date of decision, not the date of the application. There is no presumption against retrospectivity. The Law Lords do not repeat Buxton LJ’s analysis of the nature...
In an unusual example of the Court of Appeal being less liberal than the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal, the AIT’s rather good decision in YS and YY (Paragraph 352D – British national sponsor former refugee) Ethiopia [2008] UKAIT 00093 was overturned by the Court of Appeal in DL (DRC) v...
Just a quick post to highlight the fact that charges are no longer made by the Home Office for Certificate of Approval applications. The other old requirements to get Certificates of Approval still apply and are covered in an old post on this blog. This is relatively old news as...
The Home Office do like to shift the goal posts. Sometimes this is because they lost another legal case and want to get around it, sometimes it appears to be for no reason at all and sometimes, just sometimes, it seems to be for clearly explained and understandable policy reasons....
The Government’s disregard for the rule of law grows more and more alarming. I confine myself on this blog to immigration and asylum law, perhaps the most blatant area of disregard for the rule of law, but other examples abound in the news at the moment. The latest example in...
I posted on this relatively recently but another important judgment has just come out: ZH (Bangladesh) v SSHD [2009] EWCA Civ 8. The case is yet another good one from Lord Justice Sedley. The Court of Appeal find that the whole purpose of the 14 year rule (by which illegal...
It was already clear but now it could not be clearer: you do not have to show that there are ‘insurmountable obstacles’ to your family joining you abroad in order to succeed in an Article 8 family life case. The new judgment in VW (Uganda) is crystal clear and very...
News just in: the Home Office’s secret policy of a presumption of detention in almost all deportation cases was this afternoon declared unlawful [judgment now available]. The current version of the Enforcement Instructions and Guidance, which incorporates the policy, was also declared unlawful. Mr Justice Davis holds that the policy...
An interesting judgment has just come out in which the High Court has held to be unlawful the policy of a blanket denial of right to work for those caught in the Legacy backlog. It is called Tekle v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2008] EWHC 3064 (Admin)....
The Home Office is apparently not going to appeal the recent Zimbabwean test case, RN (Returnees) Zimbabwe CG [2008] UKAIT 00083.* This strongly suggests that status will be granted to Zimbabwean asylum seekers who qualify and who receive decisions from now onwards. Appeals that are allowed on the basis of...
This news will be welcomed by Zimbabweans in the UK. The decision in the latest test case, RN (Returnees) Zimbabwe CG [2008] UKAIT 00083 is now doing the rounds with immigration lawyers and will no doubt be properly published in due course on the AIT website. (UPDATE: see here). It...
A few higher court immigration cases came out recently, on which I will post in due course. One was HG & Ors v SSHD [2008] EWHC 2685 (Admin), in which Mr Justice Underhill grappled with the Legacy backlog and the five year wait faced by many Legatees. In other related...
The Tribunal have just issued a determination holding that proxy marriages in Brazil must be recognised in English law. The case is called CB (Validity of marriage: proxy marriage) Brazil [2008] UKAIT 00080. There seem to be a lot of these Brazilian proxy marriages about at the moment. I had...
There has been a fascinating little story unfolding around a case called SD (expert evidence) Lebanon [2008] UKAIT 00078. The Guardian picked up the story and ran an article on it on Monday. Dr Alan George is a respected academic and a specialist in the Middle East. He has been...
In the case of EM (Lebanon) v SSHD [2008] UKHL 64 the House of Lords looked at Article 8 again (having done so earlier this year as well) and delivered another landmark judgment. It is believed to be the first time in European legal history that a higher court has...
[UPDATE: case overturned by Supreme Court] In a case called AM (Ethiopia) & Ors v Entry Clearance Officer [2008] EWCA Civ 1082 the Court of Appeal has just upheld the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal’s approach to the question of what lawyers call ‘third party support’. Third party support is financial...
Further to my last post on this subject, it turns out that my surprise was entirely justified, as a different and more senior panel of the tribunal has decided, basically, that Metock changes nothing and it should be business as usual. The case is SM (Metock; extended family members) Sri...
Since the introduction of fees for immigration applications in 2003, the Home Office has become fanatical about collection of these fees. If the fee isn’t included with the application, no application is considered to have been made, so your leave to remain might expire while you think the Home Office...
I’ve just come across another good case from the Court of Appeal that came out over the summer while I was away: the fantastically named GOO and Others [2008] EWCA Civ 747. It is yet another example of a long and tarnished line of tribunal case law being overturned. I’ve...
It should not be a shock that the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal have in a case called HB (Algeria) just accepted the European Court of Justice decision in Metock. UK courts and tribunals are required to accept the ECJ’s judgments on the interpretation and meaning of European Community law, after...
Shocker: the Home Office appear to have accepted what the Lords say in Chikwamba (see previous posts on the House of Lords cases themselves and then on the secret policies if coming to this fresh). The policy just published and now to be applied in all relevant Article 8 cases...
The House of Lords have just issued four judgments today, three of which are good news for immigrants. The first is Beoku-Betts. In a surprisingly short judgment the Lords tell the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal to stop messing around and get on with assessing the rights of all family members...
News just in from Mark Henderson, the barrister behind the Zimbabwe test case litigation, is that HS is appealing the negative decision of the tribunal in his case, which was used as a test case for all Zimbabweans currently in the UK. Permission to appeal sounds like it was refused...
I found it necessary to polish off a bottle of wine before writing this post (Charon QC would be proud, although Rioja it was not), for reasons I think are probably clear from reading it. It is not a pleasant subject. The European Court of Human Rights, often referred to...
Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister, has written to the Immigration Law Practitioners Association (ILPA) with some further clarification on the no return amendment to paragraph 320 of the immigration rules (see here, here and here for previous posts on this). There are no shocks, really, but he does rather usefully...
It was with considerable pleasure that I read in the paper this morning that the HSMP Forum has won its challenge to the Home Office’s heavy-handed and inconsiderate change to the HSMP rules. I could use stronger language, but I’ll leave it to Mr Justice Bean, who decided the case:...
JCWI have put out a press release stating that the Home Office has been granted permission to appeal to the House of Lords against the Court of Appeal judgment in Baiai. The press release does not appear on the JCWI website, however, so I’ve copied it in below. The news...
The official version of the determination, with explanatory headnote, has now been made available. Click here for link to the BAILII version. There will almost certainly be an application for permission to appeal. Whether that will be granted is far less certain.
...Permission was granted today by Mr Justice Sullivan in a judicial review of the decision to retrospectively change the immigration rules on the qualifying criteria for settlement under the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme. The case will now proceed to a full hearing. The background is that since 2002 the government...
Since I posted last night about the outcome of the HS (Zimbabwe) test case (we lost) the AIT seems to have removed the determination from its website. However, by clicking here you can get hold of a copy I downloaded earlier, in the finest Blue Peter fashion. I suspect that...
Many thanks to the leaver of a comment left on an earlier post on HS (Zimbabwe) for this. The result of this important test case seems to have appeared with no fanfare on the AIT website, in the unreported determinations section. It isn’t yet listed as a Country Guideline case...
I heard a great story the other day about the country guideline case that had been listed to deal with the situation in Iraq and the new ‘serious harm’ definition in the EC Qualification Directive. I had wondered what had happened to this, but what with the delay with coming...
There have been some excellent and well-informed posts about this case already in the legal blogging world, notably at Nearly Legal, Head of Legal and the prolific Jailhouse Lawyer. No-one has explained the rationale for why the relevant EC Directive — full title Directive 2004/38/EC on the right of citizens...
The Court of Appeal has given the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal another good ticking off. The case is AG (Eritrea) v SSHD and, frankly, is probably of no interest whatsoever to anyone except geeky immigration lawyers such as myself. However, it’s another piece of objective proof that the current AIT...
