Britain has a proud history of welcoming refugees. It also has a shameful history of hostility to refugees. Often exactly the same refugees at the same time. As with all real life and real history — as opposed to more transparently ideologically driven accounts — it is a complex story....
There aren’t many books about immigration law in the United Kingdom so the publication of a new one should be regarded as something of an event. On top of that, it’s not often a book challenges your view of the concept of “law”. Professor Robert Thomas’ Administrative Law in Action:...
If you want to learn about the history if nationality and immigration law, there are few options available to you. Even if you have access to a really good library, Ann Dummett and Andy Nichol’s classic Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others dates to 1990. The books on nationality law by...
Well-known human rights barrister Adam Wagner, based at Doughty Street Chambers, recently published Emergency State: How we lost our freedoms in the pandemic and why it matters (Bodley Head, 2022). I’m going to start this blog post with a short fairly conventional review of the thrust of the book. But...
Imagine a scene. Prime Minister Liz Truss finds herself reading Free Movement blog tomorrow, sees the terrible harm her and her predecessors have been causing to documented and undocumented non-British citizens and decides to get rid of Britain’s borders. All of them. Those at port as well as those operating...
My textbook on refugee law, imaginatively entitled Refugee Law, is published today. It is aimed principally at undergraduate and graduate students on refugee law courses, or related courses where students need to learn about refugee law and the protection of refugees. It will also be useful to lawyers and advisers...
Described in the foreword by Upper Tribunal President Peter Lane as “an invaluable work for all who practise in the field of immigration law”, the Immigration Appeals and Remedies Handbook by Mark Symes and Peter Jorro has entered its second edition. Published earlier this year, it is available directly from...
There are only two things that legal aid lawyers can do to mitigate the losses they inevitably face by undertaking publicly funded advice work: reduce the time they put into each fixed fee case, or reduce the number of legally aided cases they take on. This is the stark finding...
The legendary tome that is Macdonald’s needs no introduction for most immigration lawyers. It is the reference book on immigration law. If you want to know something and Google — or dare I say even Free Movement — fails you, this is the place to look it up. It’s certainly...
The first edition of The Refugee in International Law, written by Guy Goodwin-Gill, was published in 1983 and is considered the birth of modern refugee law. For the third edition in 2007 Goodwin-Gill was joined by Jane McAdam as co-author. The fourth edition has just been published and Goodwin-Gill and...
The Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law, edited by Cathryn Costello, Michelle Foster and Jane McAdam and published in June 2021, is a massive book in every sense. Some five years in the making, running to 1,258 pages, consisting of 65 chapters, all by different authors (and sometimes multiple authors),...
The now notorious conclusions of the Sewell Report on race relations in the UK are no doubt at odds with the experiences of many in this country, in particular migrant communities. Surprisingly, however, the report didn’t comment on Britain’s immigration system at all. Leah Cowan’s Border Nation (Pluto Press) is...
The second edition of Professor James Hathaway’s The Rights of Refugees Under International Law, to be published on 22 April 2021, is incredibly well-timed. Our government here in the United Kingdom is proposing “off-shore processing” of asylum claims — if an agreement can be reached with some other country to...
Sir James Munby once warned that public confidence in the family courts, which he ran between 2013 and 2018, was undermined by “ignorance, misunderstanding, misrepresentation or worse”. The problem affects all areas of law but takes different forms. “Ignorance”, to adopt Sir James’s blunt phrasing, arises from a lack of...
In (B)ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire, published last week by Manchester University Press, Nadine El-Enany argues that British nationality and immigration laws are acts of colonial theft. Having expropriated untold wealth from the countries comprising her empire, Britain used this seed capital to construct infrastructure, health, wealth, security, opportunity...
If you haven’t noticed immigrants being blamed for everything from crime to low wages and overstretched public services, you have not been paying attention. In Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats, the writer, journalist and academic Maya Goodfellow examines how this came to be. In short, decades of immigration policy...
We are told repeatedly by UK politicians that EU citizenship is too expansive; it confers too many rights to encourage too much freedom of movement to too many people. This is why The British People voted to leave in the 2016 referendum, we are told. It is refreshing to read...
James Hanratty RD, known as a compassionate and sometimes rather unconventional judge, will be a familiar name and indeed face to any London-based barrister specialising in immigration work. I for one was relieved rather than panicked when I would see that he was my client’s allocated judge in the morning...
If you want to look up how the Immigration Act 2016 works in practice, A Guide to the Immigration Act 2016 by Alison Harvey and Zoe Harper is the definitive guide to the legislation. More comprehensive than my own introductory ebook to the Act, Harvey and Harper dive straight into the detail. Every single section of...
IMMIGRATION APPEALS AND REMEDIES HANDBOOK By Mark Symes and Peter Jorro (Bloomsbury, 2015) (£37.40) When the President of the Upper Tribunal, Immigration and Asylum Chamber writes a foreword, and the foreword concludes with the words “This is…. a compulsory addition to the library of every immigration judge and practitioner” one...
Finding Home: Real Stories of Migrant Britain is a new book by Emily Dugan. Emily is Social Affairs Editor at The Independent and has reported with empathy on immigration issues on a number of occasions. I generally try to avoid films, television and books on immigration and asylum issues simply...
What feels like months ago now I was kindly provided with a review copy of Detention Under the Immigration Acts: Law and Practice by Graham Denholm and Rory Dunlop with Lisa Giovannetti QC as Consultant Editor. It has taken me this long to do the actual review because I have...
Professor Hathaway’s original Law of Refugee Status has near mythical status in the lexicon of asylum lawyers. Published as it was in 1991, it was one of the first texts in the field, emanating from a time when English refugee law comprised largely basic propositions about the standard of proof,...
The ninth edition of Macdonald’s Immigration Law and Practice is now available for purchase. Fully updated with material on the Immigration Act 2014 and much, much more, this is an essential text for any serious immigration lawyer. You can pick up a copy here (affiliate link, and also I am...
