Today marks a significant date in the immigration lawyer’s calendar: it is 50 years exactly since the Immigration Act 1971 received royal assent. Free Movement staff have planned a party to celebrate the occasion (not). The 1971 Act is the root of British immigration law. 50 years on, it seems...
We get it: immigration law is tricky. Even so, C1 v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2021] EWHC 242 (Admin) is on another level and is probably best summarised by this GIF: Math Calculate GIF from Math GIFs The gist of the decision is that the Home Office...
Immigration law is complicated. This will probably not be a surprise to readers of this blog. There has, over the last couple of years, been a concerted effort to simplify it. This is a good thing. But has it been successful? Different types of complicated Immigration law can be complicated...
The Home Office has accepted the need to simplify the “complex and confusing” Immigration Rules and says that the work is already underway. In an official response to the Law Commission’s recent report on the subject, the department says that “we have already begun the process of reviewing, simplifying and...
The Law Commission’s long-awaited report on Simplification of the Immigration Rules says that rewriting and paring down the “overly complex and unworkable” document would improve legal certainty and transparency for applicants as well as save money for the courts and the Home Office. The Immigration Rules are the document that set...
I am seeing more and more people who have filed their own visa application, relying on what they’ve read on the immigration pages of gov.uk. They often tell me that they followed the information on the website carefully when preparing their application and were surprised to receive a refusal citing...
Always a worry (but never a surprise) when Court of Appeal judges start off a judgment by saying that the case “has a tortuous procedural history”, is “highly technical” and involves “Byzantine… provisions” of immigration law. Firdaws v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] EWCA Civ 1310 is...
The Immigration Rules should be redrafted and restructured in order to cut down on complexity, the Law Commission says. Launching a consultation on Simplifying the Immigration Rules today, the influential law reform body proposes major revisions to “provide a more logical structure, remove unnecessary repetitions and improve the drafting”. The regulations...
There is so much in the immigration white paper, publishedjust before Christmas, that sounds pretty good for employers. But if the sponsorship system is to cope when extended to cover skilled workers arriving from the EU, a huge amount of work will be needed to simplify it. The white paper confirms...
A client’s statement “I was foolish to…” in a witness statement is sometimes the starting point for the submission “My client is not clever enough to lie/to lie to the extent alleged by the Respondent”. It is an uncomfortable submission to make in the presence of a client but it can...
The appeal of Orhan Mendirez [2018] CSIH 65 is an interesting judgment from the Inner House in which both the Upper Tribunal and First-tier Tribunal come in for criticism. Both failed to approach their decision-making task, in an appeal focused on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights,...
Afzal v East London Pizza Ltd (t/a Dominos Pizza) (Rev 1) [2018] UKEAT 0265_17_1304 is a decision of the Employment Appeal Tribunal. It touches on the vexed issue of an employee continuing to work while awaiting a decision from the Home Office on an immigration application. From an immigration law perspective,...
The web of Rules and Guidance has become so tangled that even the spider has difficulty controlling it. So says Lord Justice Underhill in Mudiyanselage v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 65, the latest decision in a long lineage examining the much maligned Points Based...
One of the fundamental principles of the rule of law is that the law “must be accessible and so far as possible intelligible, clear and predictable” (Tom Bingham, The Rule of Law, 2010). The reasons for this should be self evident. Just as it is impossible to play a sport fairly...
In 2011, Russell and Ellen Felber set up the award-winning Torridon Guest House in Inverness. It has hundreds of stellar reviews across TripAdvisor and similar sites. The New Yorkers made their home in the Highlands having fallen in love with the area during a holiday there, initially spending £300,000 to...
The Supreme Court has given judgment in the case of Mirza v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2016] UKSC 63. The case concerned the effect of section 3C of the Immigration Act 1971 as amended and whether it extends leave where an applicant for leave is found later...
The Court of Appeal condemns the complexity of the Points Based System in the case of Hossain & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2015] EWCA Civ 207. Lord Justice Beatson says at paragraph 30: The detail, the number of documents that have to be consulted, the...
