Immigration and asylum barrister, blogger, writer and consultant at Garden Court Chambers in London and founder of the Free Movement immigration law website.
I am looking forward to voting Labour on 4 July. I live in the Bristol Central constituency and am fortunate to have Thangam Debbonaire as my local MP. I’m doubly […]
Following last year’s legacy backlog clearance exercise, the backlog of cases has shifted to either end of the asylum process. There are tens of thousands of cases that are sitting […]
Over and over again we hear that refugees should claim asylum in the first safe country the reach. There are variations on the theme. Genuine refugees claim asylum in the […]
One of the changes wrought by the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 (remember that?) is an apparent increase in the standard of proof in refugee status claims. This change applies […]
In AM (Belarus) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2024] UKSC 13, in a judgment delivered by Lord Sales, the Supreme Court has held that a man living […]
It is ten years since I launched Free Movement membership. In that decade, I’ve increased the cost just once, in 2022. Two years later, it is time for another increase. […]
The government has launched a formal and anodyne-sounding “Consultation on reforms to social housing allocations“. It proposed a new series of bars to being allocated certain types of social housing, […]
Naturalisation is the legal process by which a non-British adult becomes a British citizen. An application has to be made to the Home Office and if the criteria set out […]
The short answer is “yes, criminals can be denied refugee status.” There is a moral dimension to the Refugee Convention. But the criminal offence or offending must be particularly serious […]
A “returning resident” is a resident of the United Kingdom with settled status who returns to the country after a lengthy absence abroad. Ordinarily, when a person refers to “returning […]
