The High Court has dismissed a claim for judicial review of a paid settlement sum of £103,501.21 under the Windrush Compensation Scheme on the grounds of abuse of process as the amount offered by the government had already been accepted before pursuing the judicial review. The case is Vernon Vanriel...
Job title: SENIOR IMMIGRATION ADVISER (Scotland and Wales) Reporting to: Immigration Advice Manager Duration: 35 hours/5 days a week (full time) Location: Responsible for work in Scotland and Wales, working from home orembedded in local services. Salary: £33,250 p.a., initially an 18 month contract with expectation of extension. Application closing date: Midnight, Monday 15th May About...
The immigration rules are full of harsh general rules accompanied by potential exceptions. These exceptions require a subjective judgment to be made and they make the rules complex. They also manufacture risk for applicants, making the outcome of immigration applications hard to predict. Unpredictability, combined with the high financial and...
The Home Office has now published caseworker guidance on requests from applicants not to attend Visa Application Centres overseas to submit their biometrics data, or alternatively to delay attending a centre, where it is not safe to do so. Usually, an application for a UK visa will not begin to...
The High Court has confirmed that the restrictive parameters of the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme put in place in January 2022 do not stray from the intention of the policy as it was originally announced in September 2021. R (GA) v Secretary of State for the Home Department and Ors...
Last month, two new visa concessions were added to the Hong Kong British Nationals (overseas) (BN(O)) route. You can read about them in more detail in the Home Office guidance. Leave outside the rules where financial or residency requirements cannot be met The second amendment extends the concession that enables the...
The Innovator Founder visa route was launched on 13 April 2023, designed for entrepreneurs looking to establish an innovative, viable, and scalable business in the UK. In line with the government’s wider ‘UK Innovation Strategy‘, this new route replaces the “Innovator” and “Start Up” routes, with the aim of providing...
A recent appeal concerning third country national’s right to continue residing in the UK after divorce from an EU national and release from prison was dismissed by the Court of Appeal. The case is Balogun v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2023] EWCA Civ 414. The appeal pre-dated...
The Court of Appeal has re-affirmed that the domestic violence provisions in the immigration rules are restricted to certain categories of partners and is not open to partners of Points Based System dependants, even if they have in fact suffered domestic abuse. The case is SWP v Secretary of State...
On 6 April 2023, the Home Office started data sharing with the financial sector again. This was foreshadowed in a speech by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on 13 December 2022. Sections 40A to 40H of the Immigration Act 2014 requires banks to carry out immigration checks on all customers with...
The Upper Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) anticipates recruiting for fee-paid and salaried Upper Tribunal Judges in the relatively near future, including opportunities for fractional salaried working. With that in mind, a number of ‘recruitment roadshows’ have been organised around the country for those who might be interested: Time: 4.30pm...
The Illegal Migration Bill, the government’s answer to the ‘small boats crisis’, was proposed to Parliament on 7 March. Since then, it has faced fierce criticism from international organisations including the UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), national refugee support organisations, those supporting victims of torture, children, trafficking victims and...
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In a helpful judgment, the Upper Tribunal has awarded £10,500 to a child who was unlawfully prevented from entering the UK from Greece to be re-united with his cousin who had been recognised as a refugee and had lived in the UK for many years. R(MA) v Secretary of State...
For this month’s roundup podcast, Sonia and I manage to rattle through a huge volume of updates in a mere 36 minutes. We cover a load of cases, some important asylum policy updates and then several developments in immigration law as well. We’re sorry it is a little later than...
The government’s new Illegal Migration Bill is the latest in the long line of attempts to deal with refugee arrivals by making life difficult for them. In so doing, it sidesteps the real issues, the reality of both the facts of the refugee issue in the UK and where our...
The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration has now published a report on visit visa operations between December 2022 and January 2023 which confirms that overall, this area of the Home Office is functioning well, with an apparent “focus on improving the operational effectiveness of the workflow tool”. Post-pandemic,...
This week news broke about a row between Westminister and the Senedd regarding the inclusion of care leavers who arrived in the UK as unaccompanied children seeking asylum in their Universal Basic Income Pilot after a letter from a number of Welsh ministers to the Justice Minister, Lord Bellamy was...
This is an exciting opportunity for an experienced Immigration Solicitor to work on a project dedicated to increasing the capacity for legal representation within the sector by setting up a new, innovative legal aid casework service within RLS. We are looking for an experienced Solicitor to build RLS’s legal aid...
An exploration of the different entitlements to family reunion for parents and siblings of refugee children and partners and children of adult refugees was recently heard in a judicial review that highlights the barriers to family reunions in the immigration rules and the importance of safeguarding refugee children as increasing...
Salary: negotiable, based on experience Hours: 3 days per week Benefits: Flexible working including part-remote; parental leave; workplace pension; generous training and development budget; generous annual leave plus public holidays. Location: Hammersmith, London. Duration: Permanent Deadline for Applications: Friday 12th May 2023 Start Date: ASAP Cromwell Wilkes is an outstanding...
One of the latest cases to be brought to the High Court concerning accommodation standards for asylum seekers in the UK states that the UK is in a “crisis” and that the “current influx of refugees is presenting the government with very difficult challenges as regards their accommodation and support”....
The government claims that refugees should use ‘safe and legal routes’ to come to the UK. This forms a crucial part of its rhetorical defence for the recently-introduced Illegal Migration Bill because the Bill will deny refugee protection in the UK to any who arrive by irregular routes, including crossing...
Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick has today announced that it will no longer be necessary for a decision that an asylum or human rights claim is clearly unfounded to be checked by a second caseworker. You can read his written statement to parliament here. Where an individual is from a designated...
We live in what some have called ‘multi-status Britain’, a country in which discrimination is baked into a social, economic and racial hierarchy based on different forms of legal status. With British citizenship, other forms of British nationality, indefinite leave to remain, permanent residence, the five year route to settlement,...
The Illegal Migration Bill paints a picture of irresponsible refugees who seem to delight in travelling illegally to the UK in dangerous small boats. Its claim to prevent refugees travelling to the UK by these illegal and dangerous routes is a laudable aim. But the story is not so straightforward....
Despite strong public interest considerations in favour of respecting extradition agreements, the High Court has decided that a Polish national who came to the UK as a fugitive eight years ago will not be extradited. The case is Dobrowolski v District Court in Bydgoszcz, Poland [2023] EWHC 763 (Admin). Background...
The Global Business Mobility Senior or Specialist Worker visa was previously known as the Intra-Company Transfer visa. In 2022, the route was rebranded and grouped together with four other temporary work visas now known as the Global Business Mobility routes. You can find them in the immigration rules under Appendix...
An important update confirms British citizenship rights for people born to EU citizens between 1 January 1983 and 1 October 2000 following a change in the Home Office’s position on how British nationality law applies to them. The change was first announced during a hearing before the High Court in...
The European Court of Human Rights has given formal notification to the UK government of an application by an Iraqi asylum-seeker (anonymised as NSK) challenging his removal to Rwanda. They also found that several of the Rule 39 interim measures to prevent individual applicants being removal to Rwanda have now...
The government is right that the asylum backlog needs to be urgently addressed, but the Illegal Migration Bill will not tackle the backlog in any meaningful sense and could cause devastating harm to the rights of some of the most persecuted people in the world and the international refugee system....
An addendum to the Memorandum of Understanding between the UK and Rwanda signed last month when Suella Braverman visited Rwanda has now been published. The memorandum aim is to “create a mechanism for the relocation to Rwanda of individuals arriving illegally in the United Kingdom, who do not make an...
The High Court has upheld the effectiveness of the ouster clause in the Judicial Review and Courts Act 2022, which ousts the jurisdiction of the courts in Upper Tribunal permission to appeal decisions except in very limited circumstances. The decision is R (Oceana) v Upper Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber)...
Over the past week the Home Office have announced a number of plans to re-accommodate asylum seekers, culminating in yesterday’s announcement of an “accommodation barge”. So far the government has announced substitute accommodation to hotels at: When and if all sites are up and running (most likely not at full...
The Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens (PRCBC) is seeking to recruit an experienced, self-motivating and committed Legal Practice Administrator to assist Solange Valdez-Symonds, PRCBC’s supervising solicitor and CEO. The postholder is expected to be at the core of and involved in all aspects of PRCBC’s work....
The High Court has rejected a challenge to the Secretary of State’s decision to move a group of Afghan families rescued from the Taliban in 2021 from one temporary hotel to another temporary hotel. R(HZ) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2023] EWHC 660 (Admin) leaves open the...
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Will the Illegal Migration Bill breach the 1951 Refugee Convention, a global treaty to which the UK is party? The key point of contention in relation to this question is the Bill’s imposition of a blanket duty on the Home Office to remove to a “safe third country” non-nationals who...
Job title: SENIOR IMMIGRATION ADVISER (Scotland and Wales) Reporting to: Immigration Advice Manager Duration: 35 hours/5 days a week (full time) Location: Responsible for work in Scotland and Wales, working from home or embedded in local services. Salary: £33,250 p.a., initially a one-year contract with expectation of extension. About Settled...
As well as guidance for individuals receiving the new asylum questionnaires under the streamlined process, Refugee Action has produced guidance for unregulated or OISC Level 1 caseworkers, and guidance for asylum volunteers. The aim of these guides is to assist those who have been approached by or who are working...
