Children

The story of Patrick Thies, a US NHS surgeon who had to return to the US to apply for a new visa for his two adopted children while his British wife and biological son remained in the UK, made the news a couple of weeks ago. Immigration and nationality law as it relates to international adoption is undoubtedly complex and a topic with which only a few practitioners are familiar. There are numerically very few international adoption cases, after all. The inevitable cross over with family law does not make it any easier. This blog post provides an overview of the subject. Types of adoption The first thing to note...

The Court of Appeal in GD (Ghana) [2017] EWCA Civ 1126 explained once again what effect residence orders granted by a Family Court have on immigration matters, and criticised both representatives in the First-Tier Tribunal for failing to put the relevant law to the Tribunal. The ‘residence order’ regime has now been replaced with ‘child arrangement orders’ by the Children and Families Act 2014, but this does not change the effect of family proceedings on immigration proceedings. Residence orders are made by a Family Court and determine with whom a child subject to the order will live, and will usually last until the child is 16 years of age. A decision-maker...

In W v SSHD [2017] EWHC 1733 (Fam) (07 July 2017) a married couple resident in the UK on a Tier 2 visa attempted to bring their 2-year-old adoptive son, V, to join them from Nigeria. The application they made for him to enter as a Points Based System dependent was rejected after the Secretary of State refused to recognise the currency of the Nigerian adoption document. As the couple were unable to satisfy any of the available statutory routes to demonstrate the adoption in the UK, the only option available was to apply for recognition of the adoption at common law. Such an order would have the same effect...

For some reason the Home Office has just released a swathe of inspection reports into a wide range of Home Office operations. In practical terms, this makes it impossible for the press to pick out more than one or two stories from the reports and it therefore very effectively reduces scrutiny. Usually I have nothing better to do than sit and read these reports when they are hot off the press (!) but 10 in two days seems excessive even to me I cannot stir myself to read all of them. It is almost as if there is something to hide somewhere in there. Nevertheless, I am going to confine...

Under the British Nationality Act 1981, a child who is born in the UK and is (and always has been) stateless is entitled to register as a British citizen. See Schedule 2, Paragraph 3: 3 (1) A person born in the United Kingdom or a British overseas territory after commencement shall be entitled, on an application for his registration under this paragraph, to be so registered if the following requirements are satisfied in his case, namely— (a) that he is and always has been stateless; and (b) that on the date of the application he was under the age of twenty-two; and (c) that he was in the United Kingdom...

In an oral decision in the case of R (on the application of AO & AM) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (stay of proceedings – principles) [2017] UKUT 168 (IAC) given on 28 March 2017, the Upper Tribunal refused the Secretary of State’s application to stay the Judicial Review proceedings of AO and AM, two unaccompanied minors previously in the Calais Jungle, and who had been refused their transfer to the UK under the expedited Dublin III process. In the decision Mr Justice McCloskey, President of the Upper Tribunal, offers very useful and interesting guidance on the principles to be followed in applications to stay proceedings pending...