Seeking asylum in the UK as a woman can result in legal and practical struggles to establish the need for protection as a refugee. This blog post will explain the key struggles faced and how the Home Office have applied assistance over the years to female immigrants, whilst also discussing the problem areas that still remain today.
Many people are trying to understand the situation for Afghans in the UK who do not have immigration status, and for people still in Afghanistan with possible rights to come to the UK.
There are many things that are still unclear and the situation is likely to change quite a lot.
In the meantime, here are a couple of useful resources for people wanting more information.
A 2021 Supreme Court decision has led to the Home Office changing their procedure for dealing with asylum claims involving accompanied children (children in the UK with a parent or guardian).
The case was called G v G and the important point of the case was that a child who is named as a dependant on an asylum claim can and should usually be deemed to have made a claim for asylum in their own right.
As a result of your experiences that have led you to claim asylum, you may have physical and/or mental health problems. If you wish these physical and/or mental health issues to form part of your asylum claim, you will need to provide evidence of them to the Home Office (and to the courts, later on in an asylum claim).
Our Management Committee member, Hyab Yohannes, considers what it would mean to “Decolonise Asylum” – countering the exclusive practices of othering, bordering and ordering.
Because of the Coronavirus public health crisis, there have been some temporary changes to the asylum and immigration process. This includes to the asylum substantive interview, further submissions, visa extensions, appeal hearings, reporting requirements and detention.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, reporting requirements have been paused for many people and largely reduced for others. Now that the lockdown measures are relaxing, the Home Office are likely to start to ask people to report again.
Migrants Organise have produced a checklist to help you see if your reporting requirements are appropriate to your situation. If the requirements aren’t appropriate, you may be able to challenge them
Leah Cowan’s Border Nation (published by Pluto Press) is a short, sharp, incisive analysis of the colonial origins of borders, the violence of immigration control and the profit motive driving so much of immigration policy and practice.
There are quotable lines on every page of this short book, which manages to dig deep into the issues and link up weighty ideas while still being very accessible.
We get a lot of people contacting us with queries about requesting permission to work from the Home Office, when you have been waiting a long time for a decision on your asylum claim.
Following two legal challenges, the Home Office has amended its published policy on granting permission to work. In this new document, they specify the contact details for requesting permission.
A month ago, the Home Secretary Priti Patel announced her New Immigration Plan, with a lot of fanfare about delivering reformed asylum system.
Some aspects of the proposals are actually current policy, some are ideas that have been floated before, many will result in legal challenges. None are the changes that the asylum and immigration system needs.