Updates, commentary, training and advice on immigration and asylum law

In case you missed it: the week in immigration news

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Free Movement’s pick of the past week’s media reporting on immigration and asylum.

You are unlikely to have missed many of this week’s crop of immigration stories.

Take Brexit and the Court of Justice. The government has, supposedly, tabled proposals for the Supreme Court to be able to refer high-level citizens’ rights issues for the Court of Justice of the European Union for a binding interpretation. That has drawn the ire of such establishment legal figures as the pro-Brexit campaign can muster, slavishly reported in the Telegraph (£) and Mail.

Such machinations, though, pale in notoriety when compared with the idea that rape victims are being questioned about their immigration status, a story broken by Politics.co.uk.

A Bar Council report into the injustices of immigration detention was also prominent, with BuzzFeed News leading the charge. Less predictably, the Conservative Home website carries a piece by Tory MP Andrew Mitchell calling the system a “dystopian stain on our democracy”.

The official immigration statistics came out on Thursday. They show that “EU Migration to the U.K. Plummeted 43% One Year After Brexit Vote”, to quote Bloomberg.

Jeremy Corbyn – fresh from an appearance on the cover of GQ magazine – gave his take on immigration policy, telling the Home Office to “be more flexible” in a letter supporting the ILR application of an American academic (Guardian).

Nobody is immune from bad Home Office decision-making. The chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants credits a blog on the Huffington Post with the reversal of a decision not to grant his wife a visa.

The Guardian is still a more reliable outlet for the plight of victims – such as the grandmother branded an illegal immigrant after living here for 50 years.

Meanwhile, in a sign that ours is a society is which priorities have gone all wrong, the Daily Mail has managed to fillet an inspector’s report on conditions at Yarl’s Wood and come up with an anti-immigrant angle: “Caterers at removal centre are told to make meals ‘more diverse'”.

In Northern Ireland news, UTV reports on the Home Office appeal in a decision that appears to prioritise the Good Friday Agreement above UK immigration law.

Finally, the Economist is among the outlets picking up on the royal wedding angle that “Prince Harry’s engagement highlights how hard it is for Britons to wed foreigners”. Our editor is quoted in the piece; see further the New Statesman.

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The Free Movement blog was founded in 2007 by Colin Yeo, a barrister at Garden Court Chambers specialising in immigration law. The blog provides updates and commentary on immigration and asylum law by a variety of authors.

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