- BY Colin Yeo
Upper Tribunal procedure rule amendment on service
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The Tribunal Procedure (Upper Tribunal) Rules 2008 are to be amended from 30 June 2014 to ensure that one party to proceedings gets notice before the other and indeed is responsible for serving the other party. Because the proceedings are immigration ones involving asylum seekers, the obvious bias in treatment of the parties, supposedly equal before the law, is not apparently generally considered to be problematic. There might be more of an uproar if the same approach were applied in housing possession proceedings, for example: you only find out you’ve lost when the bailiffs or police appear to forcibly evict you.
In fact this service provision has existed in one form or another since 2000 and was unsuccessfully challenged in the case of Bubaker v Lord Chancellor & Ors [2002] EWCA Civ 1107.
The latest iteration of the rule expands the type of asylum decision that must be sent to the Home Office for service on the asylum seeker to include decisions to refuse (or not to admit) an application for permission to appeal to the Upper Tribunal made by the person who appealed to the First-tier Tribunal. For some reason this had been left out of previous versions of the rule.
The power is very seldom if ever used to detain an asylum seeker as far as I am aware. Watch this space for my new FOI question on this, although perhaps more in hope than anticipation. The change hardly deserves The Telegraph‘s attention, and the aptly named Mark Reckless MP is likely to be sorely disappointed:
Delaying notification about their decision until they are ready to deport them and not giving them notice should result in many more deportations and is something I strongly support.
Finally, do remember that there is still the possibility of a Cart-type judicial review, so this is not necessarily the final stage in any event. And I doubt the High Court would tolerate the imposition of biased service procedures.
UPDATE: good spot by Rich Greenhill:
@ColinYeo1 Does the explan memo mean the FT and new UT service exceptions may soon be removed? http://t.co/pYpNELhhhc pic.twitter.com/MuKBI2HqPD
— Rich Greenhill (@RichGreenhill) June 11, 2014
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2 responses
Hallmarks of a racist system?…..we ever getting closer!
why cant they just close the door on asylums all together?…. from the exclusions of article 6, the reservation of Children Rights Convention, the once formidable ground of challenge ‘not in accordance with the law is soon to be history’, well documented legal aid constraints the list is endless …next in line will be ‘its reasonable killing an asylum seeker mind you ( tens if not hundreds of deaths happening in IRC ‘s are never fully investigated )
What has happened to the ‘impartiality of the Court or ‘equality of arms’ before it?
Even before its proposed amendment later in the year it hard to describe the changes as nothing but scandalous, pervasive and purely aimless in law,as its proposed ‘quick removals’ agenda is and was never going to be compatible with provisions of s47 of the 2006 Act.
(i) meanwhile before the proposed amendments later in the year,.. is loss of an UT appeal on its own going to be a lawful ground for detention?
(ii) what has happened to the five day statutory requirement notice between issuing and effecting Removal Directions?