All Articles: safe country

The inadmissibility process is what the UK has used in recent years to exclude a person’s asylum claim from being considered and decided in the UK, so that they can then be removed to a third country (first Rwanda and now France). The current inadmissibility process in asylum claims was...

12th August 2025
BY Katherine Soroya

Over and over again we hear that refugees should claim asylum in the first safe country the reach. There are variations on the theme. Genuine refugees claim asylum in the first safe country. Refugees should or even must claim asylum in the first safe country. The asylum seekers coming to...

19th June 2025
BY Colin Yeo

What should happen where young children are carried in a small boat to the United Kingdom and thereby separated from their parents in France? Should the children be returned to France to be reunited with their parents there? Or should the parents be admitted to the United Kingdom to be reunited...

6th January 2025
BY Colin Yeo

Draft regulations have been laid which will add India and Georgia to the list of ‘safe’ countries at section 80AA of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002. The Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 (Amendment to List of Safe States) Regulations 2024 need to be voted through by both...

9th November 2023
BY Sonia Lenegan

SGW is a UK-based refugee and Eritrean national. His brother, FGW, is a young person who was trapped in Libya until recently. FGW’s journey to the UK has not been quick, safe or simple. In the case of R (SGW) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (Biometrics, family...

11th November 2022
BY Sonal Ghelani

When someone says that refugees should claim asylum in the first safe country they reach, what they really mean is that other countries should look after refugees. They want others to do what they would not do themselves. Their words are really addressed to the countries through which the refugee...

1st April 2021
BY Colin Yeo

On 10 December 2020 the Home Office published a statement of changes to the Immigration Rules that appears to be a flagrant breach of the UN Refugee Convention. The purpose of the main change is to: Enhance our capacity to treat as inadmissible to the UK asylum system asylum claims...

11th December 2020
BY CJ McKinney

Immigration judges must assess whether an asylum seeker had a reasonable opportunity to claim asylum in a safe third country before holding that a failure to do so should damage their credibility, the Court of Appeal has ruled. KA (Afghanistan) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] EWCA...

12th June 2019
BY Alex Schymyck

“Why don’t asylum seekers stop before they get here?” I have been asked this question many times. There are lots of safe countries on the way, so the argument goes. Why wait until they arrive in the UK to make their claim? They’re not going to get killed in France,...

20th June 2017
BY nicknason
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