Home Office taken to court for retrospective law

10 June 2007

A Judicial Review of the Home Office's controversial immigration policy will go ahead as planned on 14 and 15 June 2007. The High Court will decide if the Home Office had a right to make new immigration rules apply retrospectively to migrants already in the UK by the time they were introduced.

"These changes forced thousands of skilled migrants to leave the country at short notice and caused a lot of hardship even to those still allowed to stay", says Mikhail Spivakov, coordinator of action group Voice of Britain's Skilled Immigrants (VBSI). "We do not object to the Home Office changing the rules from time to time, but they should do so in a fair and lawful manner. Moving the goalposts mid-play is highly unfair", he added.

"We have strong evidence that the Home Office breached the migrants' substantive legitimate expectation", said solicitor Stephen Kong pursuing the Review on behalf of the affected immigrants.

The legal action follows a year of extensive efforts to lobby the government to remove the retrospective aspect of the new rules.

"Together with ethnic groups, immigration lawyers and MPs from all parties, we were trying to convince the Home Office that their new policy is unfair. The legal action is the last resort", Mikhail Spivakov said.

notes

* The Judicial Review is focused on the retrospective change to the qualifying period for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) from 4 to 5 years for holders of employment and British ancestry visas introduced in April 2006.

* Later in 2006, the Home Office went on to force migrants on the Highly Skilled Migrant programme (HSMP) to requalify under new, stricter criteria. As a result, thousands of people faced deportation, however, at least one appeal against this has been won on legitimate expectation grounds. A separate Judicial Review is sought to assess the HSMP rule changes as a whole.

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