Roots to Return and Garden Court's Jo Wilding say migrants face being denied access to justice
In a Guardian article on Tuesday, Roots to Return, an organisation that helps people appeal against deportation from the UK, highlighted concerns that the Home Office is pursuing a policy of deportation regardless of justice.
Image credit: UK GovernmentThe article by Roots to Return's Lotte Lewis Smith says that the "deport first, appeal later" policy, set to be rolled out to all immigration cases, creates the very conditions for these appeals to be unsuccessful, let alone be lodged in the first place.
"Once removed from the UK, people often find themselves destitute with little money or job prospects, and no connections or resources to pursue an appeal – which requires a UK-based lawyer or representative, £140 to lodge the appeal within the 28-day deadline and access to evidence supporting a human rights or asylum claim. If it is a human rights claim or a family-based one, the evidence will be in the UK – and thus extremely difficult to gather from abroad", the article states.
Roots to Return says this is severely damaging the role of appeals as a vital part of accessing justice in the UK.
The article also highlighted how the coming 500% increase in tribunal fees would act as a further barrier to justice.
Jo Wilding, a barrister at Garden Court Chambers who is working on a PhD looking at the prohibitive cost of legal representation, wrote about the impact of the immigration tribunal fee increases in an article on The Conversation yesterday.
Wilding says the increases "potentially denies access to justice to large numbers of people who have been told they need to leave the UK, the vast majority without having committed any offence."
According to the article, lawyers believe immigration will be the only area of justice in which users are expected to pay the full cost of the tribunal proceedings, adding: "There doesn't appear to have been any attempt to justify this apparently discriminatory approach in the impact assessment for the new fees."
Wilding is particularly concerned that young people who sought asylum as children and then face being returned when they reach the age of 18, will find they cannot get legal aid and will be unable to appeal because of the prohibitive cost.
"Whatever you think about migration as an issue, people are entitled to fairness in the administration of the laws and rules that parliament creates, and access to the courts where fairness has broken down. The idea that some people should pay disproportionately for that access, in effect because they are migrants, suggests the UK is creating a chauvinistic kind of justice," Wilding concludes.
Citizenship fees for children
Meanwhile, the Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens (PRCBC) and Amnesty International UK yesterday published a briefing on the fees for the registration of children as British citizens.
You can read it here.
The briefing says that "the Secretary of State has essentially assumed the power and propriety of charging children fees that have become exorbitantly and prohibitively high."
The briefing states: "Currently, the registration charge for children is £936, of which £272 is said to constitute the cost of administration and £664 is profit to the Home Office. The escalation in the fee over the years has largely and inappropriately mirrored the escalation in fees for adult naturalisation and for settlement application … Such high fees are incompatible with parliament’s intention in legislating to preserve both: • the entitlement to British citizenship of certain groups of children born in the UK; and • the means whereby other children whose future clearly lies in the UK may become British citizens even though not born here."
PRCBC and Amnesty UK recommend in the briefing that:
• The profit element of the fee be removed
• A fee waiver be introduced on grounds of inability to pay
• No fee be charged in cases where a child is assisted by a local authority