In the case of R (On the Application Of Medical Justice) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2024] EWHC 38 (Admin), handed down on 12 January 2024, the High Court allowed a judicial review brought by the charity Medical Justice to a Home Office policy of seeking a second medical...
This article provides an overview of what a medico-legal report is, the different types of reports available and when they should be used. A medico-legal report is frequently used to document the psychological and/or physical result of torture and other forms of ill-treatment which an individual has been subjected to....
The Home Office has released a new Interim Guidance: Requesting a second opinion for an external medical report/Medico-Legal Report as part of their offender management caseworker guidance. The new guidance aims to “introduce an additional, clinical input to assist decision-making for those who may be vulnerable in immigration detention”. The...
Mark Henderson, Rowena Moffatt and Alison Pickup have produced an update of the seminal Best Practice Guide to Asylum and Human Rights Appeals and (bless them) made it available online through the Electronic Immigration Network. As a dumb medic, I cannot pretend to have any useful opinion about most of...
The Home Office has published a new policy on Medical evidence in asylum claims. For years there had been policy on medico-legal reports from the Helen Bamber Foundation and Freedom from Torture. There was also a much scrappier policy on medical evidence not from those medical foundations. This new August...
Lawyers interested in deportation will be aware of the decision in AM (Zimbabwe) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2020] UKSC 17, handed down in April 2020. In that case, the Supreme Court set out the correct test that should be applied to cases where the courts are...
A client’s statement “I was foolish to…” in a witness statement is sometimes the starting point for the submission “My client is not clever enough to lie/to lie to the extent alleged by the Respondent”. It is an uncomfortable submission to make in the presence of a client but it can...
R (Aboro) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWHC 1436 (Admin) is an unlawful detention claim about how conflicting psychiatric evidence should be interpreted. The Secretary of State relied upon the evidence of a detention centre doctor, in preference to experts instructed by Mr Aboro, to justify...
Should the Home Office read all of the supporting evidence sent in with an application? The High Court provided a predictable answer in the case of R (Gayle) v SSHD [2017] EWHC 3385 (Admin), which considered the tragic personal circumstances of the claimant, Marie Gayle, and whether the decision to refuse...
