An adult who is not a British citizen can apply to become one. This process is known as naturalisation. People will normally be eligible to apply for naturalisation under section 6 of the British Nationality Act 1981 if they meet certain requirements. These include residence requirements. The basic residence requirement is that...
A new list of fees for immigration and nationality applications comes into effect from 8 October. None of the existing fees have actually changed since April; the Home Office is just adding the charges for Appendix EU “settled status” applications to the list. The Immigration and Nationality (Fees) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations...
Carter Thomas Solicitors is a leading UK immigration law firm listed in both The Legal 500 and Chambers and Partners. We act for businesses, education providers and individuals requiring advice on an exciting range of immigration law issues. We offer the full spectrum of immigration services from sponsor licence applications,...
The Home Office behaved unlawfully in putting on hold a child’s asylum claim for over 21 months, the Upper Tribunal has found. There are thought to be as many as 200 other children in the same position. The child had been admitted to the UK in “Operation Purnia” at the...
In C-369/17 Ahmed, the Court of Justice of the European Union has held that member states must take account of all the circumstances of the crime committed by an individual before deciding that it is a “serious crime” which justifies excluding that person from subsidiary protection. What is subsidiary protection...
Today’s Migration Advisory Committee recommendations are incredibly significant from a UK employer’s perspective. I can immediately see that a huge number of UK employers are likely to be faced with potentially significant new administrative burdens if the recommendations are implemented. The vast majority of UK employers have little or nothing to...
The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) has published its long-awaited research into migration from the EU and how it should be managed after Brexit. The report will disappoint advocates of a fairly liberal regime, recommending as it does that if there is no specific agreement with the EU on migration, there...
The UK authorities do not emerge with much humanitarian credit from this newly reported tribunal case. For years the government has strenuously resisted the obviously meritorious and compassionate request by a stateless refugee family to be reunited. As a result of blind adherence to strict rules and a deliberately narrow interpretation...
Refugee Legal Support – Athens, a charitable project that sends volunteer immigration lawyers to Greece to give legal advice to refugees, has launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund its work. The project was set up last year with an initial grant from the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association and has since...
Last week the Court of Justice of the European Union upheld the UK’s approach to the Worker Registration Scheme in force between 2004 and 2011 for citizens of new EU countries. The case is C-618/16 Prefeta v UK. The judgment in effect endorses the Home Office view that time spent working in...
It is one thing when the state seeks to withdraw a permission or privilege. It is a very different matter when it seeks to interfere with an individual’s rights. Privileges are precarious. In the absence of good reason to the contrary, rights should be secure. This emphatic opening line comes...
Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott delivered a speech today on what Labour in government would do about immigration. It doesn’t do to get too excited about these pronouncements, because Labour is not in government, but here is a link to the full text and a few highlights. Labour wants to...
The government has announced a new type of permission to remain in the UK for children resettled from the Calais refugee camp last year who would not otherwise qualify for asylum. So-called “Calais leave” will allow children brought over from the infamous “Jungle” camp between October 2016 and July 2017...
On 4 September the Republic of Ireland announced plans for a new “regularisation scheme” to allow certain undocumented migrants to remain in the country legally. The amnesty will be open to anyone who came to Ireland as an international student between January 2005 and December 2010 and is now undocumented. Although...
Immigration lawyers helping sponsoring universities navigate the complexities of the Points Based System naturally have an economic interest in overseas students — but then so does the rest of the nation. That is the uncompromising conclusion of the independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), whose experts find that “there is no...
In May, Nick wrote about the important High Court decision in R (Lauzikas) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWHC 1045 (Admin), which threw a spanner in the works of the Home Office’s policy of automatic detention of foreign criminals at the end of their sentence. Mr Lauzikas (incorrectly...
Welcome to the July 2018 edition of the Free Movement immigration update podcast. This month I start by discussing some developments in nationality law, then cover the EU Settlement Scheme that is starting to take shape and currently being piloted. While we await Brexit, EU law still applies, so we...
The Court of Appeal has ruled that the Strasbourg decision in Paposhvili v Belgium (application no. 41738/10) has no effect on cases where someone relies on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights to claim that they should not be removed from the UK because of a lack of medical...
In this post, we consider the type of evidence and information which should be gathered to support the appeal of a non-EEA national who has been made subject to an order for deportation. It is adapted from our full online training course on deportation law, available to Free Movement members....
If negotiations on an orderly withdrawal from the European Union break down completely, the UK risks a “chaotic Brexit” on 29 March 2019, with no overall withdrawal agreement in place nor any smaller deals to mitigate the shock of a no deal outcome. Both the UK and EU27 could take...
The Independent and the Telegraph are reporting on the upsetting case of a little boy, born in Leeds, who is being denied re-entry to the UK because the Home Office has revoked his British passport. Mohamed Bangoura, aged six, was staying with relatives in Belgium over the summer and “marched away from...
TF and MA v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] CSIH 58 is a recent Court of Session (Inner House) decision which addresses two key themes within the immigration and asylum sphere. Firstly, the extent to which adverse credibility findings against an appellant on the basis of one...
The government’s immigration inspector, like the rest of us, is a little fed up with Home Office spin. David Bolt published the results of an re-inspection of the refugee family reunion process today with the acid comment: Predictably, the Home Office’s formal response accentuates the positives in my report… Mr...
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Despite our remarks in previous blogs about the useless nature of British Overseas Citizen status, a series of judgments handed down by the High Court this summer demonstrate that this unusual version of British nationality is sufficiently valuable to encourage the pursuit of lengthy and expensive litigation against BOC passport...
Browsing LinkedIn the other day I came across this post by Jacqueline Victor-Mazeli, a barrister at Law Lane Chambers: Appeal hearings [at the First-tier Tribunal] are presently taking place an average of 12 months after decision. The passage of time can see circumstances or caselaw change as well as see further...
The British Nationality Act 1981, which took effect on 1 January 1983, introduced British citizenship into UK nationality law. In doing so, it removed the principle of jus soli – the principle by which citizenship is acquired by being born on the territory – from the operation of that nationality...
In 1985, immigration solicitor Sheona York read an article in the Guardian about a new technology for proving someone’s identity. She called the inventor, Professor Alec Jeffreys, at the University of Leicester to see whether this “DNA testing” could help to resolve an immigration dispute. The Home Office was demanding...
There have been a quite a few reports, briefings and pieces of research on immigration released in the past week — too many to cover in the weekly newsletter, as I had intended. It is very much back-to-work reading rather than anything for the beach, but may be of interest....
The “Surinder Singh route” has become well known to British citizens seeking to be reunited with their family members. The toughening up of UK immigration rules in July 2012 – particularly the introduction of the minimum income rule with its labyrinthine documentary requirements, and the awful elderly dependent relative rules...
With the Article 50 deadline fast approaching, there has been growing concern that the UK will leave the European Union with “no deal”. If no withdrawal agreement making provision for a transition period is reached by 29 March 2019, the UK will fall out of the EU without an agreement...
Claiming asylum is an important human right backed by the United Nations Refugee Convention and recognised by countries around the world. In order to make this right a reality in practice, countries like the UK have set up systems by which people must apply for asylum. In this way, asylum...
I am quoted in a recent Guardian story about the notorious, if niche, paragraph 322(5) of the Immigration Rules. This is the rule being used to refuse leave to remain to migrants because of alleged discrepancies between their tax returns to HMRC and the income declared to the Home Office...
In R (H) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWHC 2191 (Admin) the High Court has rejected two complaints about how the Home Office recognises and cares for trafficking victims in detention. First, the claimant argued that Rule 34 and Rule 35 of the Detention Centre Rules...
The UK government has published a series of papers on what a “no deal Brexit” would look like but the crucial issue of EU citizens’ rights is not covered in the first batch. Earlier today the Brexit Secretary, Dominic Raab, launched the “first batch in a series” of technical notices...
The Upper Tribunal has ruled that the term “worker” in the regulations concerning the rights of residence retained by non-EEA nationals if they divorce their EEA spouse includes jobseekers. This means that when someone who has given up work during marriage gets divorced from an EU citizen they will still...
The recently published UK Lesbian & Gay Immigration Group report Still Falling Short examines the Home Office’s decision-making in asylum applications from LGBTQI+ people. The report is a qualitative study of mainly lesbian, gay and bisexual cases. It analyses Home Office interview records and reasons for refusal letters to assess...
Immigration lawyers are among the groups being asked by the Home Office to submit evidence about what caused the Windrush scandal and what would prevent a repeat. In a “lessons learned” call for evidence issued on 20 August, the department says that “immigration advisors and lawyers who may represent those going through the...
We’ve three new Upper Tribunal decisions for you this week. Alex has written up one of them already and will cover another later in the week, lest readers be overwhelmed with too much excitement in one day. The third new case is called Mansur (Immigration adviser’s failings, Article 8) [2018] UKUT 274...
