Home Office policy on deportation notice ruled unlawful on appeal

A HOME Office policy giving migrants as little as 72 hours’ notice of their impending deportation is unlawful because it created “an unacceptable risk of interference with the right of access to court”, the Court of Appeal has ruled.

Medical Justice took legal action over the policy by which migrants were given between three and seven days’ notice that they might be removed from the UK at some point during the next three months without further warning.

The campaign group argued it would be impossible for those who do not already have a lawyer to obtain one in the notice period, meaning the policy posed “a serious threat to the rule of law”.

In September last year, the High Court rejected Medical Justice’s claim that the Home Office had “curtailed or removed the right of access to court to challenge ( its) decisions”. Mr Justice Freedman found that the Home Office had included “a whole series of safeguards” in the policy which he said “operate so as to preserve rather than to impede access to justice”.

But Medical Justice took its case to the Court of Appeal, which unanimously ruled yesterday that the policy was unlawful because it led to “a real risk of denial of access to justice”.

Lord Justice Hickinbottom – sitting with the Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett and Lord Justice Coulson – found that “whether an irregular migrant is removed before he or she has had an opportunity to obtain legal advice and apply to the court is a matter of pure happenchance”. He found that the policy, suspended since March 2019, was therefore “arbitrary” and unlawful.

Lord Justice Hickinbottom said the policy “incorporated an unacceptable risk of interference with the right of access to court”.