There has been considerable fuss made in the last week about a handful of refugees crossing the English Channel to claim asylum here in the UK. Here I’m going to look at the numbers, the wider context, what we know about refugee decision making ...

Thousands of people may have been unlawfully held in immigration removal centres in recent years, the court of appeal has ruled. This opening sentence from a Guardian article the other day refers to the case of R (Hemmati & Ors) v Secretary of St ...

The UK authorities do not emerge with much humanitarian credit from this newly reported tribunal case. For years the government has strenuously resisted the obviously meritorious and compassionate request by a stateless refugee family to be reunited.� ...

The Court of Justice of the European Union has taken a strict approach to time limits on take back requests imposed by the Dublin III Regulation. In case C‑213/17 X v Staatssecretaris van Veiligheid en Justitie, the court ruled that Italy had respon ...

Today the Court of Justice of the European Union handed down a decision in the case of C-647/16 Adil Hassan v Prefet du Pas-de-Calais concerning the Dublin III Regulation. The press summary is here. Practitioners will be well aware how intricate and ...

When an asylum seeker returns to an EU member state they’ve previously been transferred from under the Dublin III regulation, how should their application for international protection be processed? The Court of Justice of the European Union in C-160 ...

In R (RSM (A Child)) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 18 the Court of Appeal considered the ambit of Article 17 of the Dublin III regulation, the so-called “discretionary clause”, and found it to be narrow indeed. The c ...

The UK and France have agreed a new Sandhurst Treaty on the management of their shared border. We’ve heard the spin from Macron and May, but what has actually been agreed and will it have a life after Brexit? Given how central the issue of asylu ...

Majid Shiri, an Iranian national, arrived in Austria through Bulgaria in 2015. He made an asylum claim in Bulgaria in February of that year but claimed asylum in Austria the following month. The Austrian authorities asked Bulgaria to take Mr Shiri bac ...

Case C-36/17: Daher Muse Ahmed v Bundesrepublik Deutschland The EU does not want asylum seekers to ‘shop around’ its Member States. To this end, various Regulations exist to prevent someone who has already claimed asylum in one Member State from s ...

Al Chodor and Others (C-528/15) In a highly significant judgment the CJEU has shown, in effect, that the Home Office has unlawfully detained hundreds or even thousands of individuals seeking international protection. The background facts The Al C ...

If the case of Tarakhel was considered another body blow to the Dublin system, the recent Court of Appeal case of NA (Sudan) v The Secretary of State for the Home Department [2016] EWCA Civ 1060 has picked up the Dublin system up off the ropes for ano ...

Full judgment is available here: R (on the application of ZAT and Others) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (Article 8 ECHR – Dublin Regulation – interface – proportionality) IJR [2016] UKUT 61 (IAC). The applicant child ...

Several news outlets are reporting this morning that the Dublin III Regulation is likely to be scrapped by the Commission in March. It may be that Peter Sutherland, the UN Special Representative on Migration, was right when he said last year that the ...

Germany has taken the extremely welcome step of suspending the transfer of Syrian asylum seekers under the Dublin III Regulation. As long ago as November 2013 UNHCR called for countries not to return Syrian nationals to their first point of entry in t ...

There have been some significant recent developments in the Dublin system, which is the means by which people who enter the United Kingdom and claim asylum are returned to the first EU country they have passed through. A child of five with a map could ...

It tickles me that UKIP plan to scrap the EU agreement that permits the UK to return asylum seekers to other EU countries without considering their asylum claim. As it stands, this EU agreement, often referred to as the Dublin Convention or Dublin Reg ...

The Court of Appeal yesterday gave judgment in Tabrizagh and others, the application for permission to appeal from the decision of Laing J. The written judgment is not available yet but will be soon [UPDATE: R (On the Application Of Tabrizagh & Or ...

Largely unnoticed by many, on 1 January 2014 a new legal regime entered force regarding the allocation of responsibility for considering asylum claims from persons who have entered the country from elsewhere in the European Union: Regulation (EU) No ...

The good name of the greatest city in Ireland, and indeed Europe, has long been sullied by association with the Dublin II Regulation, which followed the original Dublin Convention as the means by which countries unfortunate/fortunate enough to be alon ...

In the case of NS v UK (C-411/10) (see here for FM’s earlier alerter post), the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) held that the transfer of an asylum-seeker from one EU Member State to another under the Dublin II regulation is no ...