In recent years the United Kingdom government has resorted to indirect measures like the hostile environment to force people to leave the UK, alongside directly removing people. The government can then claim that the person left the UK voluntarily, and may have thought that there could be no liability for...
Do you want to help child refugees access safe, legal routes to sanctuary? Do you want to join a ground-breaking, determined and compassionate charity that is leading the fight for child refugees caught in limbo in Europe and elsewhere? Safe Passage is recruiting a Lawyer. This is an exciting opportunity...
The High Court has ruled that charging a citizenship fee of over £1,000 to children is unlawful. The decision will be widely welcomed by campaigners who have long argued that the fee charged to register a child as British, which is set far above the administrative cost of processing applications,...
The Tier 1 (Investor) visa allows foreign citizens to get permission to live in the UK in return for an investment of £2 million in the British economy. The investment can be in shares or bonds issued by UK companies. Around 12,000 people have come to the UK on a...
The Upper Tribunal has shot down a scheme under which people looking for a Tier 1 (Investor) visa would borrow money from one company and invest in a closely related company. In a judicial review against the Home Office for refusing the Tier 1 (Investor) applications of two Chinese citizens...
In all likelihood, the events of last Thursday mean the UK will be exiting the EU on 31 January 2020 with a deal. This means EU law will remain in place during a transitional period at least until 31 December 2020. After this date, either the transitional period is extended...
The Upper Tribunal has rejected an attempt by the Home Office to ignore the clear meaning of an Immigration Rule. Sahebi (Para 352(iii): meaning of “existed”) Pakistan [2019] UKUT 394 (IAC) is about paragraph 352A(iii), which covers reunion for the family members of people who have been granted refugee status...
SR, who is from Iraq but settled in the UK in 2002, wants to become a British citizen. The Home Office does not want to grant him citizenship, accusing SR of holding “extremist Islamic beliefs” and raising concerns about “financial irregularities”. The case came to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission,...
The Supreme Court has found in the case of Patel and Shah v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] UKSC 59 that the carers of EU citizen children can derive a Zambrano right of residence only where the child will as a practical matter of fact be forced to...
If you haven’t noticed immigrants being blamed for everything from crime to low wages and overstretched public services, you have not been paying attention. In Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats, the writer, journalist and academic Maya Goodfellow examines how this came to be. In short, decades of immigration policy...
The Conservative Party has won the general election and a mandate for its policy of an “Australian-style points based system” for immigration, whatever that means. The party manifesto leaves readers none the wiser. We can reveal that more details do exist. Last weekend, a rash of media stories emerged stating...
The Court of Appeal has given judgment in Akinyemi v SSHD (No 2) [2019] EWCA Civ 2098, a long-running appeal concerning the deportation of a man who was born in the UK in 1983, and has never left. In reversing (again) the decision of the Upper Tribunal to dismiss Mr...
One fifth of British people have become more relaxed about immigration over the last few years, mainly because of a more “positive narrative” about immigration. Over 20% of people surveyed by the research firm Ipsos MORI have recently become more positive, or less negative, about the impact of immigration, of...
The High Court has declared that the Home Office policy of waiting until an asylum decision is made before considering whether to grant trafficking victims Discretionary Leave to Remain is unlawful. Under that policy, a recognised victim of human trafficking who has claimed asylum might wait months or years for...
In the case of R (Karagul & Ors) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] EWHC 3208 (Admin), the High Court has found that the Home Office breached the principle of procedural fairness when refusing applications under the Ankara Agreement on the basis of bad faith or dishonesty....
What will the government formed after Thursday’s general election do with the UK immigration system? The three main political parties — those that have been in government before and might be again — have all published manifestos addressing immigration and asylum. Below is a table showing how the manifestos compare...
On a warm summer’s day in late July, five sets of appellant lawyers found themselves in Court 4 of the Upper Tribunal in Field House, huddled together on what could only be characterised as “the naughty step”. Unaware at the start of the day the rationale for the hearings before...
The secretive court that hears immigration and nationality cases with a national security element has hit out at lawyers for failing to follow its rules. A Special Immigration Appeals Commission practice note, published on 4 December, slams the work of immigration lawyers in national security cases as at times “unacceptable”....
In a case that sent me googling the definition and pronunciation of Note Verbale (“a diplomatic communication prepared in the third person and unsigned: less formal than a note but more formal than an aide-mémoire”; pronounced nawt ver-bal), the Court of Appeal has issued a judgment that, at first blush,...
A mentally ill Iranian man who was kept in immigration detention for 838 days in total has secured £100,000 in compensation from the Home Office. The test case concerning a man known as AKE was settled in the High Court today, according to Garden Court Chambers, whose barristers acted in...
Article 2(n) of the Dublin III regulation provides: Member States shall not hold a person in detention for the sole reason that he or she is subject to the procedure established by this Regulation. When there is a significant risk of absconding, Member States may detain the person concerned in...
I am seeing more and more people who have filed their own visa application, relying on what they’ve read on the immigration pages of gov.uk. They often tell me that they followed the information on the website carefully when preparing their application and were surprised to receive a refusal citing...
For those lawyers, like my Lord and myself, who have spent many years practising in the family jurisdiction, this is not a comfortable interpretation to apply. But that is what Parliament has decided… So held Lord Justice Baker, giving judgment in SSHD v KF (Nigeria) [2019] EWCA Civ 2051, and...
Citizenship in Times of Turmoil?, a book which I edited and published with Edward Elgar Law earlier this year, was launched a few days back. Hosted by the law firm Anthony Gold’s housing law team, the event was attended by legal practitioners, activists and academics of several disciplines. This was...
The Upper Tribunal is to consider a legal challenge to the government’s policy on immigration fee exemptions. Duncan Lewis’s public law team have secured permission for a judicial review in which they argue that the fee waiver policy wrongly focuses on whether migrants would be made “destitute” by the fee,...
An incorrect decision under the EU Settlement Scheme could impact the terms by which EU citizens and their family members are able to reside and access services in the UK after Brexit. Statistics we have retrieved on administrative reviews of Settlement Scheme decisions show that 89.5% of initial decisions reviewed...
The EU Settlement Scheme has an application deadline, meaning that anyone who misses the cut-off to apply successfully for a post-Brexit status will be unlawfully resident in the UK. What will happen to people who have not made an application by the deadline is unclear. In the worst case scenario,...
R (Al-Enein) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] EWCA Civ 2024 is another valiant but failed attempt to challenge the Home Office’s good character policy in relation to applications for British citizenship. The issue in this case was whether the policy of looking back at a person’s...
A crowdfunding campaign has raised the £2,500 in Home Office fees needed to reunite a Ghanaian mother in the UK with her 13-year-old son stranded in Ghana. The fund was started on the initiative of Bethan Lant of the charity Praxis, who wrote about her client’s desperate situation on Free...
The new Tottenham Hotspur manager, José Mourinho, recently vowed not to repeat his past mistakes, but instead will make new mistakes. The Home Office’s new guidance on statelessness, as with its approach to other topics, both repeats some mistakes of the past and makes new ones. But the revised guidance...
An asylum appeal by an Eritrean woman, initially rejected by an immigration judge, has been overturned by the Upper Tribunal after it emerged the court interpreter embarked on a political rant to the woman’s barrister at the bus stop outside court afterwards. The case is TS (interpreters) Eritrea [2019] UKUT...
The Innovator visa, launched in March 2019 to “enhance the UK’s offer to overseas entrepreneurial talent“, has attracted a grand total of 14 applications in its first six months of operation. That compares to 997 applications for its predecessor visa, Tier 1 (Entrepreneur), over the same period last year. Figures...
There’s been a lot written on this blog recently about overstaying. Why do we keep banging on about it, you may ask? Because even a short period of technical overstaying, even if entirely innocent and endorsed by the Home Office, can cause problems for future applications. This was demonstrated recently...
The Court of Appeal has given judgment in CI (Nigeria) v SSHD [2019] EWCA Civ 2027, providing further guidance on the law relating to the deportation of foreign criminals, and in particular on the meaning in section 117C(4) of the Nationality Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 of “lawful residence”, “social...
The Supreme Court has confirmed in the case of Hemmati v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] UKSC 56 that the detention of asylum seekers for their removal to other EU states under the Dublin Regulation was unlawful between 1 January 2014 and 15 March 2017, when new...
“Be careful what you wish for!”, could be the headline for the case of Ahmed (rule 18; PTA; Family Court materials) Pakistan [2019] UKUT 357 (IAC). Haseeb Ahmed, a Pakistani citizen, was initially refused an application for leave to remain by the Secretary of State. He won his appeal at...
We’ve received the following enquiry about the rules on settled status for EU citizens and their families after Brexit: Can the third country national spouse of a dual EU/British national apply for the EU Settlement Scheme? “Third country national spouse” is immigration lawyers’ jargon for a non-European husband or wife....
Today sees the start of industrial action, including strikes, across 60 universities. Members of the University and Colleges Union are striking over pensions, pay and conditions for the next eight days, with other forms of action planned when they return to work. During the strikes of February 2018, there was...
Most people born in Northern Ireland have or are entitled to dual citizenship, British and Irish. Generally people apply for the passport of the country which they identify with — nationalists for Irish passports, unionists for British — and are never troubled by the legal fact that they may technically...
If the polls are to be believed, the manifesto that the Conservatives launched yesterday will be the legislative agenda for the UK’s next government. Whichever way you intend to vote in the upcoming election, it needs careful scrutinising to see what a Conservative victory could mean for the UK’s immigration...
