The numbers of people in immigration detention have increased in the last decade. The UK has one of the largest immigration detention systems in Europe. There is no time limit. So opens a Bar Council report on Injustice in Immigration Detention, published today. As a Twitter-length summary of the issue, it...
The case of R (Miah) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2017] EWHC 2925 (Admin) concerns a British citizen who made an application for a passport, was refused, and ordered to leave the country. He had no in-country right of appeal against the decision. This case highlights serious issues...
Measures requiring banks to check on the immigration status of existing account holders come into force today. To celebrate, the Home Office has published some brief guidance for those who, as “disqualified persons”, find their current account locked or closed. It has also updated its guidance for the banks themselves....
The difficulty of presenting asylum claims based on religion is well known. Such claims raise difficult evidential problems, which are addressed in this detailed post by Colin Yeo. But AS (Iran) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2017] EWCA Civ 1539 seems to pose a novel difficulty: should a claim...
Eight months and a warning from the Information Commissioner later, the Home Office has finally replied to my Freedom of Information request on waiting times for EU residence documents. The figures only go to the end of 2016 and it seems likely that waiting times have increased yet further since...
The Home Office has lost a judicial review over its controversial change to the definition of torture in a claim brought by unlawfully detained torture victims. The judgment is in the case of Medical Justice & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2017] EWHC 2461 (Admin). In short, the...
The Home Office has broken the law by failing to publish the waiting times faced by EU citizens trying to get residence documents. The Information Commissioner ruled that Amber Rudd’s department is in breach of the Freedom of Information Act, having sat on the request for seven months and counting....
Banks and building societies are to carry out immigration checks on a reported 70 million bank accounts in accordance with the Immigration Act 2016, amending the Immigration Act 2014. The provision ordering this will come into force on 30 October 2017. Regulations introducing a code of practice have been laid down. For...
Brian White, abandoned as a baby, lived in a Zimbabwean orphanage until the age of six. He was fostered, and later adopted, by the White family in Wolverhampton. He came to the UK to join the family when he was 15, at which point he should have been granted Indefinite...
Panorama, Undercover: Britain’s Immigration Secrets is required viewing for anyone interested in immigration in the UK. It is also deeply uncomfortable viewing. It documents an undercover investigation into Brook House, one of the UK’s 13 Immigration Removal Centres. The episode shows detainees subjected to severe violence, taunting, and mistreatment. A...
R (Bashir) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2017] EWCA Civ 397 The British Sovereign Base Areas (“SBAs”) are small British-run areas on the Cyprus islands that survived the former colony’s independence. The Home Office has taken the position for a number of years that the Refugee Convention...
Brexit is causing significant delays in the processing of EU free movement documentation applications. In normal times, before the Brexit vote on 23 June 2016, an EU national could expect a permanent residence certificate to be issued in about 6 weeks and a family member about 4 months or so. The...
The Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, David Bolt, has published five new inspection reports. The most interesting is on the “hostile environment”, specifically the powers to deny driving licences and bank accounts to migrants unlawfully resident in the UK. The report reveals that the Interventions and Sanctions Directorate (“ISD”)...
The Home Office has imposed fines on small businesses for employing illegal workers of over £14 million in just a three month period. The period covered is January to March 2016. The list of businesses targeted by officials appears to include mainly small ethnic minority shops and takeaways. It is...
The Immigration Act 2014 removed rights of appeal to an independent judge against refusal of many immigration decisions, replacing appeals with a system of internal review within the Home Office. It is called Administrative Review. The Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, David Bolt, has just published a report into how...
The First-tier Tribunal has allowed the Home Office appeal against the Information Commissioner’s decision that training slides used to inform Home Office Presenting Officers on the 2014 legislative reforms to human rights law should be released. Some additional limited information will be published but the Home Office’s internal instructions to...
David Bolt, the Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, recently published a new report into the effectiveness of services that the Home Office outsources to private contractors, finding that inefficiency and lack of communication contribute to a waste of resources and time. The full report is available here: An Inspection...
The “right to rent” scheme and legislation refers to a mysterious “permission to rent” which can be granted by the Secretary of State, presumably to those who do not otherwise possess the right to rent. Section 21(3) of the Immigration Act 2014 reads: But P is to be treated as...
It is very widely believed that the Human Rights Act stops the UK from deporting foreign criminals whence they came. To a limited extent, there is some truth in this. Some appeals against deportation decisions do succeed on human rights grounds. Not many, though, and none succeed because of the...
The Home Office often makes mistakes when exercising its immigration powers. The high appeal success rates bear testimony to this: as many as 50% of some categories of appeal are allowed. However, there are only some limited circumstances where it is possible to extract compensation from the Home Office by...
Just a quick one to flag up a new report by Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration John Vine into the European Casework Directorate at the Home Office. The report is generally quite positive but the emphasis of the press release, introductory text and subsequent press reports is on potentially...
Home Office appeals against first instance judge decisions used to be very rare indeed. Some years ago, it apparently became standard practice to seek permission to appeal in some asylum allowed appeals and all or virtually all deportations cases. It now appears to be standard practice for the Home Office to...
Update: The Daily Record has carried a story about the whole affair. Update 2: And it’s on Buzzfeed now as well. Busy creating some of the new online courses for the new training project, I was looking for something on the unnavigable gov.uk website and came across the Home Office...
The Home Office has managed to use a photo of a child that it wanted to remove from the UK as the face of its campaign to overturn a High Court judgment allowing divided families to be reunited. The news item concerns the controversial minimum income rule that is dividing...
Very pleased to have played a role in bringing about this review: it was here on Free Movement that the case referred to by May was revealed before being picked up by The Observer. A Home Office document leaked earlier this year revealed how one bisexual asylum seeker was asked...
In another highly critical report on immigration enforcement by the Home Office, the Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration John Vine has found that in nearly two thirds of cases (59%) immigration enforcement officers entering business premises lacked the legal authority to do so and in addition were regularly flouting their...
The Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration has just published a damning report looking at the removals process at the Home Office. That the Home Office is not effective in conducting removals is hardly news to those of us who work in immigration law but even I was surprised by...
We suggest that if the sureties were aware of x’s illegal status in the UK, they have been complicit in assisting him in defying UK immigration law, and are therefore unsuitable in ensuring he comply with the conditions of bail. Alternatively, if these sureties were unaware of x’s illegal status...
A Parliamentary written answer yesterday revealed that of the Syrians that managed to get to the UK to claim asylum in 2013, 24 were forcibly removed and a further 20 remain in immigration detention today. That seems to me truly shocking. It certainly gives lie to the UK Government’s hollow...
A Home Office spokesman said: “Staff who make exceptional contributions to the work of the Home Office are eligible for special one-off payments” Apparently a total of 11,672 bonuses were paid in 2012/13 to around 40% of staff, equating to a mean bonus of £559. Who knew that 40% of staff at...
The following questions are transcribed from the interviewer’s written record of an interview with a detained asylum seeker who stated he was bisexual. The interview took place in October 2013, beginning at 10.25am and ending at 4pm. There was a one hour break for lunch. No lawyer was present at...
This determination was quietly released by the Judicial Office late last year. It is unusual for immigration cases to be publicised in this way. Presumably in this instance it was because of likely public interest in the final outcome rather than the procedural issues arising. It does seem to me,...
This is a very short survey to gather information for a possible legal challenge to the Home Office practice of withdrawing decisions late in the day and perhaps to the tribunal procedure rules, which provide for automatic termination of the appeal. We are very grateful for your time. Any responses...
Where an immigration official alleges that a document used in an application is false or forged, a ‘Document Verification Report’ (DVR) is routinely prepared. This report states the reasons why immigration officials believe the document is false. It is vital that an applicant suspected of deception can answer the charge,...
Many migrants and their families get caught in a situation where they apply to the Home Office for permission to stay, are rejected but then are unable to appeal the decision to the immigration tribunal. This has long been a problem (‘Refusal with no right of appeal revisited‘) but is...
