The Country of Origin Information Service (COIS) at the Home Office is the successor to the generally derided Country Information and Policy Unit (CIPU). CIPU reports were poorly researched and outright biased against asylum seekers, although many immigration judges mistakenly treated them as the whole truth. In 2004 the Immigration Advisory Service...
Bail for Immigration Detainees recently obtained statistics from the Ministry of Justice on the number of bail applications that are made at different hearing centres, and the outcomes of those hearings. There is quite a disparity in outcomes. For example, once withdrawn cases are set aside, the percentage of bail...
Shocker: the Home Office appear to have accepted what the Lords say in Chikwamba (see previous posts on the House of Lords cases themselves and then on the secret policies if coming to this fresh). The policy just published and now to be applied in all relevant Article 8 cases...
I have come across four secret Home Office policies since I returned at the start of September. Normally the Home Office has been quite good at disclosing the policies that officials apply to cases. There is a large section on the BIA website devoted to this. Legal challenges in the...
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 Directorate, now the Border and Immigration Agency. Oddly,...
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 currently before Parliament. Each Act has involved an overhaul of existing immigration law […]
...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 a piece of research by the excellent Heaven Crawley (full report, executive...
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 asylum seeking children, or UASCs as they are sometimes referred to in...
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. Obviously, these cases are extremely traumatic for the victims...
