I said some time ago that I would do a post on this subject and here it is… The maintenance requirement is one of the key tests in the immigration rules, and it applies to all categories of immigrant except refugees and their families. To meet th ...

There’s no amnesty. That’s all. I wish it wasn’t necessary to repeat this, but good immigration lawyers and good community groups are reporting increasing numbers of walk-in clients who have been charged large sums to make an applica ...

There have been a lot of hits on this site from people looking for news about the Zimbabwe test cases. The latest news is that last week’s hearing is now over. The panel consisted of Mr Ockelton (Deputy President of the Asylum and Immigration Tr ...

Exactly one year ago, on 25 July 2006, then Home Secretary John Reid announced that his officials had found around 400,000 to 450,000 unclosed asylum files found down the back of the sofas at Lunar House, home of the then Immigration and Nationality ...

There have been a few emails flying around amongst refugee lawyers recently about a court-ordered suspension on removals to the Democratic Republic of Congo. NCADC have posted up some information about the situation. In summary, a high court judge rec ...

UPDATE 19/4/09: The Home Office has stopped charging for Certificates of Approval. They say their policy is under review and they say they are “carefully considering the implications for those who have already paid a fee and will shortly announc ...

I’ve just seen press reports that the Home Office is suggesting that immigration enforcement officers are issued with nice pastel-coloured uniforms (‘standard-issued clothing’) when doing dawn raids on families to remove them from ...

I’ve updated the Borders Bill page here with a little more up to date information. This follows a Home Office press release on 25 June 2007 announcing that protection for children subject to immigration control will be enhanced. I’ve taken ...

I’ve just been doing the appeal on a not-terribly-well-prepared spouse case. It was a frustrating experience as the appeal may fail, although the case might potentially have been a strong one. It is difficult to tell where the fault lies for the ...

A few weeks ago, Channel 4 showed a documentary as part of the Unreported World series. The title was Mugabe’s Reign of Terror. The production company, Quicksilver Media, have taken the view that the programme is in the public domain and have m ...

The framework for immigration control is mainly contained in the Immigration Act 1971. This has been amended by major pieces of primary legislation in 1988, 1993, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006 and probably also in 2007 by the UK Borders Bill curr ...

Via a comment left on this site, I’ve been made aware of an excellent blog called EU Case Law, which I’ve added to my ‘blogroll’. It’s a really good way of keeping up to date with the latest legal developments in Europe a ...

It is a question faced by all immigrants. To be uprooted from your own country, culture and kinship network leads to enormous dislocation and can be deeply traumatic. Living in exile is difficult, whether it is the result of forced movement or is ...

Co-incidentally, after my last post on Unaccompanied Asylum Seeker Children (UASCs) an excellent but depressing article appeared in The Guardian on the same topic. It describes the circumstances in which many refugee children live and was prompted by ...

In the fourth quarter of 2006, the most recent statistics available on asylum applications, 730 unaccompanied children applied for asylum in the United Kingdom. The total number of child asylum applicants for the whole year was 2855. Unaccompanied asy ...

On 1 May 2007 a new immigration category was created, called the International Graduates Scheme. This supersedes and replaces the previous Science and Engineering Graduates Scheme, affectionately known as SEGS. The change was effected by Statement of ...

The test case of AA (Zimbabwe), mentioned in previous posts, is being dropped by the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal in favour of another case, called HS (Zimbabwe). This is apparently because the AIT did not want to have to deal with argument about w ...

Yesterday the Foreign and Commonwealth Office launched a new forced marriage survivor’s handbook. A specific team, the Forced Marriage Unit, was set up two years ago to deal with this issue and is reported to be dealing with 250 cases a year. Obvio ...

A little too reminiscent of Cromwell’s New Model Army, perhaps, the New Asylum Model is supposed to herald a new age of high quality Home Office asylum decision making. The Home Office already seem to have stopped referring to it as being New ...

The Home Office has been planning a shift to a points-based system for assessing immigration applications for some time, and recently announced the timetable for its introduction: Tier 1: beginning of 2008. This part of the scheme is for the highly ...

A number of people seem to have come across this site while looking for information about the increased immigration fees, about which I have already written a post. I thought it would be instructive to post up the old immigration fees, the new ones an ...

I’m still catching up on a few developments while I was away over Easter, and have just read the Court of Appeal case of AH (Sudan) and Others v SSHD [2007] EWCA Civ 297, which came out on 4 April 2007. This is yet another Country Guideline case ...

Until 2002 or thereabouts, the minimum age for the fiance in the UK who was to marry the person from abroad was 16 but the minimum age for the person from abroad was 18. These ages were then equalised at 18. It would appear that the age for both is so ...

This has been a sorry business. The background is that in mid 2006 it came to light that foreign prisoners serving sentences for crimes committed in the UK were not being considered for deportation at the end of their prison sentences. Instead, they w ...

The fees for immigration applications made from both inside the UK (often referred to by immigration lawyers as ‘in country’ applications) and outside the UK at visa posts (referred to as ‘out of country’ applications) are goi ...

There was some sort of riot at Campsfield Detention Centre last week, as anyone following the news more carefully than I will know. I’ve been attending a training course all week and am therefore a bit out of the loop. The BBC cover the story, a ...

I went to a debate and discussion at the Royal Society of Arts on Tuesday and it proved interesting. The politicians, John Denham, Jon Cruddas and Barbara Roche, all Labour, were fairly predictable and followed the normal approach of politicians ever ...

I went for a drink last night with a couple of immigration lawyer friends and they had a lot less sympathy for the AIT than myself. Their line was that the AIT should stop making such politically inspired and illiberal decisions, and that the latest i ...

The Court of Appeal has yet again overturned the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal’s attempt definitively to establish whether a failed asylum seeker is at risk of ill-treatment by the Zimbabwe secret service at Harare airport following a forced ...

Oh dear, another crackdown has been announced by the good Dr Reid. Read all about via the Home Office press release, or here if you prefer the BBC version. I won’t bother with links to the major papers, they are easy to look up. The press relea ...