As we continue to grapple with the impact of Brexit, my colleagues and I experienced an increase in Dublin III certification and removal cases at the tail end of last year. In many of those cases, removal directions were deferred and certification dec ...

Since 1 January 2021 people seeking asylum in Europe, be they adults or children, have been far less likely to reunite with their family in the UK. A vital legal route has been closed, as the Brexit transition period has come to end and the Dublin III ...

Greece and the UK have signed a new strategic action plan committing to further their cooperation on migration. It has gone largely unreported in mainstream media, but some Greek and English news outlets noted that the joint plan includes the reloca ...

On 30 April 2020 the Home Office published an updated policy on the Dublin III Regulation which has some significant changes for family reunification cases. The new policy includes updates on Article 9, Article 13.2 (entry and/or stay), Article 17.2 ( ...

In R (Habte) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2020] EWHC 967 (Admin), the High Court has decided that conducting a substantive asylum interview does not amount to assuming responsibility for the asylum claim under Article 17(1) of the Dub ...

The Supreme Court has confirmed in the case of Hemmati v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] UKSC 56 that the detention of asylum seekers for their removal to other EU states under the Dublin Regulation was unlawful between 1 January 201 ...

In 2011, the landmark case of MSS v Belgium and Greece concluded that conditions in Greece were so dire, asylum seekers’ human rights would be breached if returned. Removals to Greece under the Dublin III Regulation were suspended as a result.   ...

The Court of Justice of the European Union has today handed down judgment in the case of C-163/17 Jawo. The court held that asylum seekers cannot be sent back even to a fellow EU member state if they are at substantial risk of inhuman or degrading tre ...

The Court of Appeal has ruled that the regulations on the detention of asylum seekers subject to the Dublin III removal procedure comply with EU law. Background: detaining migrants before return to another EU country The International Protection (Dete ...

In Mohammad Racheed v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] CSIH 8, the Inner House of the Court of Session held that a judicial review challenge to the certification of a human rights claim to remain in the UK as “clearly unfounded” c ...

In a newly reported judgment the Upper Tribunal has quashed the Secretary of State’s decision to refuse a request from the Greek government to take charge of the asylum claims of a mother and her three children so they could reunite with the father, ...

The government has published two draft sets of changes to UK immigration law to cater for the UK’s exit from the European Union. They include ending the “Dublin III” system under which asylum seekers are sent back to Calais and elsew ...

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 ...