Apparently the Refugee Legal Centre are to change their name to Refugee and Migrants’ Justice. I’m not quite sure about the plural there or the apostrophe, both are best guesses. The name change suggests a serious change of direction for the organisation rather than just a broadening of its activities....
The news on the strikes against foreign workers has made depressing reading: British workers (and trade unions) demonstrating in favour of expelling foreigners. All rather reminiscent of Powell and the dockers. Woolly liberals such as myself find all this unsavoury. Free marketeers and economists will be profoundly concerned at any...
The Immigration Advisory Service has been around since 1972, although, out of the ashes of the old United Kingdom Immigrants’ Advice Service, it transmogrified into its current incarnation in 1994. IAS is one of the biggest providers of immigration and asylum advice and representation, but has traditionally punched below its weight, producing...
Free Movement may be cursed. Almost as soon as I blogged about DP3/96 it was scrapped, and now the same has happened to DP5/96. Phil Woolas has withdrawn DP5/96 as of 9 December 2008. This was the seven year policy under which a child resident in the UK for seven...
Apparently there are currently long waits for initial asylum interviews and decisions from the London asylum teams of UKBA. Case owner diaries are said to be full to the end of the year and it sounds as if the three month target for initial decisions is being missed. High staff...
I am acutely conscious that this is a controversial, difficult subject and there have been many comments on this topic on this blog in the past. I’ll say at the outset that many HOPOs I meet are pleasant and professional. They are a credit to the Home Office and make...
Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu has strongly criticised Phil Woolas for his attack last week on asylum lawyers and asylum charities. There’s good coverage on the BBC website and there was pre-coverage in the Telegraph too. I thought Woolas’s comments were disgraceful and ignorant. I launched into a little...
Damian Green, the Conservative frontbench spokeman on immigration, has been arrested tonight over immigration leaks for “aiding and abetting misconduct in public office” and is at this moment still in police custody. He hasn’t been charged yet. This story suddenly splashed over all the news outlets about fifteen minutes ago...
This post falls firmly into the ‘gossip’ category and cannot be taken as reliable because it is based on my own incomplete understanding. This is also a very fast moving situation and even if I have this right today it may well be wrong tomorrow. If anyone has further information,...
UPDATE: I’ve calmed down slightly — although I’m still fuming — and amended the original of this post. I’d recommend this article as a more reasoned response than mine. If you do read it, an escutcheon is a sort of shield or protective plate, apparently. And another very good and...
There has been a fascinating little story unfolding around a case called SD (expert evidence) Lebanon [2008] UKAIT 00078. The Guardian picked up the story and ran an article on it on Monday. Dr Alan George is a respected academic and a specialist in the Middle East. He has been doing...
The Country of Origin Information Service (COIS) at the Home Office is the successor to the generally derided Country Information and Policy Unit (CIPU). CIPU reports were poorly researched and outright biased against asylum seekers, although many immigration judges mistakenly treated them as the whole truth. In 2004 the Immigration Advisory Service...
In the selfless pursuit of immigration-related gossip and news, last Friday I went along to a gathering at a wine bar that was formerly the office of the Refugee Legal Centre. The surroundings have been somewhat improved since the RLC days, it turned out. The gathering was organised by two ex members...
So, Phil “Muslims are Inbred” Woolas (left) is the new immigration minister, and Liam “Dessicated Calculated Machine” Byrne is out (and up). Woolas didn’t waste time before playing the populist, and immediately announced that he thought there ought to be a limit to the population. Unless he is planning a...
The government is currently consulting on yet another fundamental overhaul of the immigration appeal system. This has become a bothersomely regular occurance, taking place in 1993, 1996, 1999, 2002 and 2004, with some further tweaks in 2006 and 2007 – all through primary legislation. Every time it happens, there are a raft of legal challenges […]
...The BBC is reporting that the government will announce we are finally going to sign up properly next week to the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. At the moment the UK has a controversial opt-out of one of the key parts of the Convention, Article 3,...
I have come across four secret Home Office policies since I returned at the start of September. Normally the Home Office has been quite good at disclosing the policies that officials apply to cases. There is a large section on the BIA website devoted to this. Legal challenges in the...
UPDATE: THIS RUMOUR DOES NOT APPEAR TO BE TRUE There is a reasonably credible rumour doing the rounds amongst lawyers as well as Zimbabweans themselves that Zimbabwean asylum seekers can apply for permission to work – presumably with a reasonable expectation of the application being granted. The application is to...
I took no risks as I walked through immigration control. No point in aggravating them with a ‘nice uniform’ remark or other such wise cracks. They mainly bother poor and black people, although as I passed through ‘nothing to declare’ a young and affluent-looking black couple were being taken to...
I just came across a surprising Home Office press release. Usually, Home Office immigration press releases are recycled and re-used dribble. The ‘new’ ‘points’ based ‘system’ (I’d question the accuracy of all of these words) has been announced again and again and again, for example. This one might just be a bit...
Following on from the parliamentary debate last week, the Entry Clearance Guidance (ECG, until recently rather quaintly called the Diplomatic Service Instructions – I always thought the idea visa officers were diplomatic was rather optimistic) on immigration rule 320(7B), the automatic re-entry ban for overstayers and other breachers of immigration laws, has...
There was more evidence at the weekend that a shortage of Polish plumbers will soon hit these shores. The Observer published an interesting, thoughtful article on the return of many Eastern European migrants from Ireland to their home countries or elsewhere in Europe. One side effect was the depletion in the...
The letter setting out the settlement reached between the Law Society and the Legal Services Commision and Ministry of Justice has leaked out… and is here for anyone interested. No big bangs. A small increase to the fixed fees and some empty promises on consulting more in future. Doesn’t seem like...
There have been two important developments on returns to Iraq in the last week. The first is that an unknown number of Iraqis appear to have been removed on a specially chartered flight on 27 March. According to the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees and Stop Deportations to Iraq, there are...
Immigration lawyers have been shocked by Government proposals to introduce from 1 April 2008 a re-entry ban on immigrants who have previously breached UK immigration laws. The ban was debated in the House of Lords last night. This is very rare for changes to the immigration rules, which are usually...
A fascinating article has appeared in The Irish Times. Several tribunal chairmen — the Irish have wisely not glorified their tribunal staff with the misplaced title of ‘judges’ and I will call them adjudicators here — have resigned on the back of the Irish supreme court ordering disclosure (to the...
I’m back, after a prolonged absence and thoughts of ending it all etc etc. The blog, not me. I’m fine, thank you. The news is that of the 6000 or so (roughly 6,800, apparently) families who were the first to receive Legacy questionnaires, most of them will be getting status...
A very well sourced rumour has it that 95% of the outstanding 450,000 asylum ‘legacy’ cases so far resolved have resulted in grants of status. However, I hear that the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal have been told to prepare for extra appeals. Who in their right mind appeals against a...
There was a great article in The Guardian yesterday (yes, of course I read The Guardian) about a possible upcoming shortage of Polish plumbers. It has been predicted that British householders will soon be moaning about having to use underskilled, overpriced native ‘workers’. The serious point is that the immigration...
I’ve been spurred back into blogging by a report I just saw from The Independent. It’s about what the Home Office and lawyers call ‘re-documentation’. Where an asylum claim fails, the Home Office are quick to start preparing asylum seekers for express delivery whence they came. Where the asylum seeker has...
Further to previous posts on this subject, there have been suggestions that the legacy ‘case resolution exercise’ is producing some surprisingly humane outcomes. An organisation previously unknown to me called Positive Action In Housing (PAIH – I’ve included a link on my blogroll as they seem to be making good use of a...
There have been some excellent and well-informed posts about this case already in the legal blogging world, notably at Nearly Legal, Head of Legal and the prolific Jailhouse Lawyer. No-one has explained the rationale for why the relevant EC Directive — full title Directive 2004/38/EC on the right of citizens of...
An entertaining couple of articles appeared in The Mail on Sunday over the weekend. I’m not exactly a regular reader of that publication, but was tipped off about it. Immigration Judge “J” of Brazilian cleaner infamy gives an interview to the ‘Femail’ supplement. She comes across, rather unsurprisingly, as bitter...
There’s no amnesty. That’s all. I wish it wasn’t necessary to repeat this, but good immigration lawyers and good community groups are reporting increasing numbers of walk-in clients who have been charged large sums to make an application under the alleged amnesty, and now some idiot has put out a...
There have been a lot of hits on this site from people looking for news about the Zimbabwe test cases. The latest news is that last week’s hearing is now over. The panel consisted of Mr Ockelton (Deputy President of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal), Dr Storey (in charge of...
Exactly one year ago, on 25 July 2006, then Home Secretary John Reid announced that his officials had found around 400,000 to 450,000 unclosed asylum files found down the back of the sofas at Lunar House, home of the then Immigration and Nationality Directorate, now the Border and Immigration Agency. Oddly,...
