Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick today announced that the government was dropping its “differentiated status” approach to refugees, introduced less than one year ago as the centrepiece of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022. The policy was to put refugees who arrived without prior permission on a ten year route to...
The Home Office has launched a new application process for people of Chagossian descent to obtain British citizenship or British overseas territories citizenship. The introduction of this route is certainly welcome. Whilst the Chagossians are still fighting to return to their homeland, this is a step in the right direction...
A raft of changes to nationality law came into force a few weeks ago. I covered the changes at a high level on my own firm’s website (shameless plug), but wanted to write in more depth about the new section 4L, which opens up tantalising possibilities for securing British citizenship...
The government has announced the details of its much-trailed policy of treating some refugees differently to others based on their mode of arrival in the United Kingdom. The Home Office refers to this as “differentiation” but the word “discrimination” is equally apposite. The changes are being made today because section 12...
The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 was signed into law on 28 April 2022. But there is a difference between a law being “on the statute books” after being passed by Parliament and it actually being “in force”. As we explain below, some of the Act came into force on...
New rules on humanitarian protection status will apply to claims made on or after 28 June 2022. The changes are another example of how the government’s New Plan for Immigration is creating a crueller, less efficient and more costly asylum system. Around 1,000 people a year are granted humanitarian protection....
Hot off the virtual presses over at legislation.gov.uk: the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 (Commencement No. 1, Transitional and Saving Provisions) Regulations 2022 (SI 2022 No. 590). The instrument brings into force, on 28 June, around a third of the act’s 82 substantive sections. This is in addition to the...
The government has announced a deal to export the UK’s responsibility to assess asylum claims and host refugees to Rwanda. Boris Johnson said in a speech that “anyone entering the UK illegally, as well as those who have arrived illegally since January 1st, may now be relocated to Rwanda”. This...
Imagine you are a Ukrainian refugee. Imagine you have left your home, your job, and almost all of your possessions behind. Perhaps your husband or son or father — or perhaps all of them — have stayed behind to fight. You head for the nearest border. Maybe that is Poland,...
When the Nationality and Borders Bill returns to the House of Lords later today, it will contain a registration provision allowing direct descendants of those born on the Chagos Islands to become British nationals. The Chagossians will be entitled to British overseas territories citizenship (BOTC) and, if they want it,...
In R (A and Others) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2022] EWHC 360 (Admin), Mr Justice Fordham refused permission for a judicial review challenge to the consultation on the Home Office’s New Plan for Immigration. The judgment’s lengthy discussion of whether the issue was justiciable will be...
The controversial Nationality and Borders Bill had its second reading in the House of Lords this week. One thing that peers on all sides of the house seemed to agree on – even if for different reasons – is that the immigration system is not working well. They’re right. Official...
Comprehensive Sickness Insurance (CSI) continues to be a barrier to British citizenship for EU citizens. Although EU citizens were not required to have CSI to qualify for the EU Settlement Scheme, it lingers on in the citizenship requirements for people previously in the UK as students or self-sufficient persons. As...
The Home Secretary can take away anyone’s British citizenship when it would be “conducive to the public good” but would not make that person stateless. She can also take away naturalised citizenship if obtained by fraud, false representation or concealment of a material fact. The circumstances in which the Home...
In a previous briefing we saw that customary international law, four international conventions and international human rights law all impose a duty on states to rescue those in distress at sea and to set up and maintain search and rescue services. We also saw that the enforceability of international law...
About half of the Home Secretary’s speech to the Conservative Party conference today was given over to immigration and asylum, but there were no new policy announcements. In fact it was, in structure, tone and content, much like last year’s effort: free movement is dead; work visas for the “best...
We round off our coverage of the Nationality and Borders Bill, the second reading of which continues today, with Part 5. This consists of eight “miscellaneous” clauses. Four of them are what the House of Commons Library describes as “placeholder” clauses which will be fleshed out by government amendment as...
Part 4 of the Nationality and Borders Bill addresses modern slavery and human trafficking. The Home Office’s goals for reform in this area are, as ever, focused on criminality. The Home Secretary has promised that the Bill will “break the business model” of trafficking networks (and therefore save lives), ensure...
Under the sub-heading “Interpretation of Refugee Convention“, clauses 27-35 of the Nationality and Borders Bill 2021 seek to accomplish four main tasks: Translate some EU asylum law, currently residing in secondary legislation, into primary legislation. Turn back the clock on core principles of asylum law in relation to the identification...
MPs will give the Nationality and Borders Bill 2021 its second reading on 19 July. One of the Bill’s main objectives is to make the asylum system “fairer and more effective”. Most of the clauses supposedly directed to that purpose are in Part 2 of the text, making it the...
Part 3 of the Nationality and Borders Bill 2021 includes provisions relating to immigration offences and enforcement. It criminalises arriving in the UK, as well as formally entering, making it almost impossible to claim asylum in the UK without first committing a criminal offence. People helping asylum seekers get to...
We covered the nationality portion of the New Plan for Immigration in an earlier article. Many of those proposals, largely concerning British Overseas Territories citizens and the Windrush generation, were notably less cruel and unusual than the other aspects of the New Plan, and might even have been described as...
Imagine that you are – for the sake of argument – involved in a democracy movement in a post-Soviet dictatorship. Recently the police picked you up, beat the hell out of you and assaulted you in ways you’d rather not dwell on. Then they booted you out of the police...
The much-hyped Nationality and Borders Bill is here. It mainly addresses asylum issues but there are some nationality provisions included as well, which we have already covered and will return to in another article soon. My first impressions, reading through the Bill, are that A lot of it is already...
“Illegal immigration to be turned into a criminal offence in landmark borders bill”, the Sunday Express reports. The idea that unauthorised immigration is insufficiently criminalised will surprise legislators who have spent much of the past two decades piling dozens and dozens of new immigration offences onto the statute books. “Illegal...
