Author: Sonia Lenegan

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Sonia Lenegan

Sonia Lenegan is an experienced immigration, asylum and public law solicitor. She has been practising for over ten years and was previously legal director at the Immigration Law Practitioners' Association and legal and policy director at Rainbow Migration. Sonia is the Editor of Free Movement.

A new statement of changes to the immigration rules (HC: 836) has been published today and before your adrenaline gets going I can tell you that unlike some of the more recent ones, there are no immediate changes being made. As ever, the explanatory memorandum is a useful read but...

24th June 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

Recently a Ukrainian national got in touch with me to raise concerns about mass refusals of asylum/humanitarian protection claims within the community. As I have been predicting for a while, he told me that many people have been driven into the asylum system through a fear of being forced to...

24th June 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The 11th edition of the essential Macdonald’s Immigration Law & Practice has been published. The first edition was published by the late, great, Ian Macdonald QC in 1983 and the most recent edition in June 2021. Updating this comprehensive handbook is a huge and important undertaking, the general editors for...

23rd June 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

The mantra of “safe and legal routes” is regularly repeated by the government when justifying increasingly draconian legislation in an attempt to prevent refugees from travelling to the UK under their own steam. The argument is that refugees should use these safe and legal routes instead of arriving in small...

20th June 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

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

The latest report from Dr Jo Wilding, “No Access to Justice 2” looks at the continuing immigration and asylum legal aid crisis. This is an update to her 2022 report and includes a region by region analysis of demand and provision. In the 2022 report, London was the only region...

12th 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 Migration Advisory Committee has published its report on the minimum income requirement for families of British or settled migrants and has recommended that the government does not increase the minimum income threshold to the skilled worker threshold of £38,700 from the current level of £29,000. The call for evidence...

10th June 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

May is over and the immigration white paper has finally been published, so Sonia spends a bit of time at the beginning of this month’s podcast reliving the horrors of that. Andrew covers a very wide range of topics in this episode, from deprivation of citizenship to “self sponsorship” to...

10th June 2025
BY Sonia Lenegan

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
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