Backing the right to safe asylum

Status: Won

Clients: Asylum Aid

“Law for Change was proud to support Asylum Aid’s appeal. Guaranteeing genuine judicial review of the Home Secretary's plan to send individuals who are seeking asylum in the UK to Rwanda is clearly of profound public importance.”

Stephen Kinsella, Founder of Law for Change

The Issue

Law for Change backed one of the key challenges by Asylum Aid to the Home Secretary’s policy of removing asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda. Asylum Aid argued that the procedure is unlawful and unfair because it involves extremely tight timescales and makes an unlawful presumption about the general safety of Rwanda. The myriad of decisions are complex, the information provided to the individuals is inadequate and the time allowed is not sufficient to provide individuals with an opportunity to obtain legal advice, gather necessary evidence and make adequate representations.

Legal route for challenge

High Court: Supported by Law for Change and represented by Leigh Day, Asylum Aid Asylum Aid filed a claim in the High Court challenging the Home Office’s ‘Safety of Rwanda’ guidance (Policy). The claimant argued that the process of removing people to Rwanda was unfair, giving people seeking asylum an impossibly short time span – just 7 days if they are in detention – to make their case and get to Court, with no right to make representations on the general safety of Rwanda. The ruling said that individuals have no right to argue that Rwanda is generally unsafe, and they don’t need to have a lawyer to make their case.

Court of Appeal: Supported by Law for Change, Asylum Aid challenged the High Court’s judgment that the Home Office’s curtailed process for deciding who to send to Rwanda was fair and lawful. 

Supreme Court: The Supreme Court upheld the decision of the Court of Appeal that Rwanda is not a safe country for people seeking asylum and that no-one should be sent to Rwanda.

The Outcome

The Court of Appeal agreed with Asylum Aid that people must have a fair opportunity to put forward a case that a third country is not safe, including where appropriate expert and other country evidence, as well as their own facts. The Court also held that fairness required effective access to legal representation in all but exceptional cases. It held that the 7-day timescale adopted by the Home Office was obviously too short for the majority of cases, and that the Home Office needed to adopt, and publish, a clear policy on granting of extensions to that timeframe where fairness required it.  The Court therefore held that the system was not inherently unfair, because there was a way it could (with adaptations) be operated fairly. Asylum Aid did not appeal to the Supreme Court against the Court of Appeal’s ruling on its case.

The Court of Appeal ordered that there be no order for costs for both the first instance proceedings and appeal. In other words, Asylum Aid incurred no cost liability and did not have to pay any of the Home Secretary’s legal costs. The Court felt this was appropriate in recognition of Asylum Aid’s success on two of its appeal grounds and the given the Home Secretary’s change of position in the court below. This meant that Law for Change was not in the end liable for any adverse costs (as there were none) and funding could be redirected to other deserving cases.