From today a ‘leaky paywall’ has been installed on Free Movement. Guest users can view 20 blog posts per month, after which they will find they are unable to access blog content. Inspired by the Points Based System, there are now two tiers of membership: Tier 1 allows full access...
The Free Movement January sale ends this Friday, 16 January 2015. New content has just been added for members, so sign up now to get access to over 30 CPD hours of invaluable training materials. Use code JANSALE to get 25% off individual membership and 50% off ebooks. The new...
I’m running a January sale on individual membership (there’s now 30 CPD hours to choose from) and ebooks. Use coupon code JANSALE when making a purchase to apply a 25% discount on individual membership (£180 including VAT, reverts to full price after one year) and a 50% discount on ebooks. The...
Personally I managed to get away with only cooking one Christmas dinner this year, which alongside a proper break (other than writing this post) has reduced festive stress levels and helped provide a good end to the year. I’ve settled into Garden Court Chambers in 2014 and have much enjoyed...
I am pleased to be able to report that there are now over 270 signed up Free Movement Members with access to the training and reference materials, including a mix of some administrators and blog contributors, group members and individual members. 424 courses have been completed and 600 CPD hours...
Band 1 | Garden Court Chambers THE SET This impressively sized set leads the way at the London Immigration Bar, and offers an unrivalled range of capabilities across all types of work. Specialist areas of expertise include national security, family and child immigration and asylum matters. Sources say: “Their approachability...
I’m now away for two weeks on holiday, returning to work 15 September 2014. There are a few blog posts pre-written and pre-scheduled to keep you entertained until then, and at least one colleague has threatened to write something while I’m away as well. Someone is keeping an eye on...
With the help of a trusty bottle of wine I’ve updated the online courses on Article 8, the Immigration Act and the Immigration Rules (now renamed and worth 2 CPD) and on the Immigration Act 2014 (2 CPD). I have also updated the ebook on the Immigration Act 2014. The updates add...
Free Movement is now accepting advertising. Placing adverts is handled through an ad agency, buysellads.com and an advertising pack for those interested in placing adverts is available for download: The decision to accept advertising one is due to a combination of factors. One is that some development work on the...
So, the other day someone brought to my attention some internal Home Office emails about a Free Movement article. These were disclosed under a Freedom of Information request made by one Clarke Simpson, answered at the Home Office by one P. Zebedee (really?). The episode started off as a bizarre...
Just a note to say that the search engine powering searches on Free Movement has been upgraded. Search results should be improved. Searches for multiple words are ‘AND’ by default but you can override by specifying ‘OR’ instead. There is an ever increasing amount of content, particularly with the new...
Update: The Daily Record has carried a story about the whole affair. Update 2: And it’s on Buzzfeed now as well. Busy creating some of the new online courses for the new training project, I was looking for something on the unnavigable gov.uk website and came across the Home Office...
The first blog post on Free Movement was on 7 March 2007. Yet again, I managed to miss the blog’s birthday! The spanking post was perhaps a suitable commemoration, though: a serious topic covered with a frivolous headline. Since 7 March 2007 there have been: 3,048,451 visits to Free Movement...
In another leak exclusive to Free Movement it is possible to reveal further Immigration Rule changes to be introduced at short notice. It is understood the new Statement of Changes will be published on 25 December 2013, becoming the seventeenth Statement of that month and the 97th of this year....
I contributed a piece for this and can also recommend the pieces by the excellent Giles Peaker and Dan Bunting on their legal blogs, Nearly Legal and UK Criminal Law Blog. Check out the rest of the ever interesting Internet Newsletter for Lawyers while you are there.
...Regular Free Movement readers will have noted the recent addition of the Garden Court Chambers logo to Free Movement at the top of the sidebar and some excellent recent posts by some of my new colleagues, Ronan Toal, Greg Ó Ceallaigh and Taimour Lay. There will be further future contributions from...
I just noticed that I passed 3,000 Twitter followers. That feels like a lot, although nothing compared to legal Twitter titans @nearlylegal (5,435), @AdamWagner1 (13,277) and @JackofKent (46,106!). So I thought it was time for a periodic general stats and numbers check, particularly as I keep forgetting blog birthdays, the traditional time...
There will be some changes coming to the blog in the near future. No-one seems to like change, so I thought I would run these past everyone first. Some ideas are pretty minor cosmetic tweaks, others much more fundamental. I’ll start with what is definitely going to happen and move...
It looked for a while like banning this blog was all the rage. First there was some discussion on Twitter on which websites are banned within immigration detention centres, then the immigration tribunal presidents had a go as well. What are "prohibited categories" of websites in IRCs if they include...
It was with a mixture of pride and regret that I heard that last week immigration judges were explicitly and specifically instructed not to join the Free Movement forum by the two Presidents of the Immigration and Asylum Chambers. It is nice to know the blog is on the senior...
The Free Movement forum launches today. It is intended to be a private, progressive space in which immigration lawyers, campaigners, academics, students and select others can help one another and discuss any or all immigration, asylum, nationality and human rights law questions and policy. To help create that space, the...
Continuing in the spirit of innovation, the Free Movement legal forum will, all being well, launch next week. I’m seeking comments or feedback on the idea now before it goes live. A Join the forum introductory page has been added to the menu bar for a preview of what is...
With an unhealthy mixture of surprise, embarrassment and pride (emphasis on surprise, I think) we can announce that the Renaissance Chambers Immigration Team has been shortlisted for the Award for Innovation – The Bar at the Halsbury Legal Awards 2013. Congratulations for the slightly more respectable UK Human Rights Blog...
I have collected together all the blog posts for 2012 into an ebook, which is now available on the Kindle store. By a surprising automated process, the blog posts were automatically sucked up by some sort of scary blog muncher website and then spat out in pdf form, then converted...
First of all, some stats from the blog for 2012: 722,000 page views 2,000 page views per day on average 356,000 visitors 2 min 46 sec average visit duration 2 pages viewed per visit on average 149 new blog posts in 2012 (three per week) 21,500 unique visitors per month 33,608 clicks to BAILII in […]
...From its conception in 2007, the Free Movement blog has been about sharing information and ideas. When the blog first went live with an anonymous author and zero readership the ‘About’ page had this to say: All you need to know about me is that I’m a UK-based immigration lawyer....
Human Rights Watch and a proxy terror front group -Freedom from Torture, clamored that the flights should be suspended because some ‘ethnic’ Tamils were subjected to cruel treatment in the island nation. This is what the Sri Lankan government’s own Ministry of Defence has to say about the charity Freedom...
