Join us for our online workshop Knowledge is Power; Going to your asylum appeal without a lawyer, on Wednesday 9 September, 10am – 1pm.
This workshop is designed to go alongside our Knowledge is Power; Evidence workshop. Each can be attended on its own, but we recommend coming to both.
Why are these sessions important?
Our Knowledge is Power workshops, alongside our wider Public Legal Education work, are designed to respond to this reality: to give people the practical tools to prepare for their appeal, and the space to connect with and learn from others facing the same situation. As a team, we have found ourselves saying this more and more: no one is coming to save us – including lawyers. We recognise that these sessions do not and cannot replace good quality legal advice, but we also have to be honest about the context people are actually navigating.
Going to your asylum appeal without a lawyer
As part of the government’s pledge to “clear the asylum backlog,” the Home Office has been making asylum decisions quickly. In the year ending March 2026, 128,300 people received an initial decision and nearly 80,000 were refused. We know, from our communities and the Home Office’s own quality checks, that these decisions are frequently inconsistent and wrong. Poor decisions push more and more cases to appeal which has moved the backlog of cases from the Home Office to the tribunal. By the end of December 2025, the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) had around 139,000 cases outstanding, up from around 75,000 a year earlier – most of them asylum appeals, now taking an average of about 63 weeks to conclude. (Updated statistics are due later this month, June 2026.)
This session will cover
- the journey from submitting your appeal to going to your hearing
- how to read and understand the Home Office refusal letter
- a brief overview of different kinds of evidence to help you prepare
- what kinds of questions and legal tests the Immigration Judge will be using to decide whether or not to give you leave to remain
- how to prepare for the hearing itself and what to expect on the day.
Please remember that we cannot give legal advice. This session will also not be a run-through of how to submit the appeal or using the HMCTS system.
How to join the workshop
Right to Remain strives to ensure our Toolkit remains free of charge, allowing easy and unlimited access to people who are going through the asylum and immigration system, their friends and families, and unfunded and underfunded grassroots groups.
We offer free places at our workshops and events for people going through the asylum and immigration system and unfunded or underfunded groups. However, in lieu of donation, we ask for fees from funded groups, organisations and institutions, when their staff members, volunteers and other associated persons attend our workshops and events. The level of fees we seek per person is determined by the size of the group’s annual income, which we review regularly. We ask for larger donations from organisations with larger income. These fees and donations support our work to maintain the Toolkit and Right to Remain, and ensure individuals, grassroots and unfunded groups can use our resources who would otherwise face barriers in accessing knowledge. Read more about how to request a workshop and why we ask for some people to pay here.
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