Time to chuck out the lawyers
The immigration system is broken beyond repair, thanks to activist barristers and a hopeless Home Office
There can be few people in Britain who think that our system of immigration and asylum law achieves what they would like it to. Readers of the Daily Telegraph will be familiar with its regular churn of stories with eye-catching headlines about the perverse results of appeals in the tribunal system against Home Office decisions — for example, “Asylum seekers allowed to stay in UK despite lying in claims” or “Asylum seeker sold drugs days after deportation was cancelled” or “Migrant spared deportation because he has tattoos”, ad infinitum and ad nauseam...
Part of the problem is that the size and complexity of immigration and asylum law defies comprehension. If you ask Google’s AI how many UK immigration statutes there are, its response is: “It is impossible to state a definitive number of UK immigration acts because new legislation is continually enacted and previous acts are often amended, rather than replaced entirely.”
The answer is not less than 13, starting with the Immigration Act 1971. The Supreme Court said in a 2013 judgment: “The Immigration Act 1971 is now more than 40 years old and it has not aged well. It is widely acknowledged to be ill-adapted to the mounting scale and complexity of the problems associated with immigration control.”
The immigration system is broken beyond repair, thanks to activist barristers and a hopeless Home Office
There can be few people in Britain who think that our system of immigration and asylum law achieves what they would like it to. Readers of the Daily Telegraph will be familiar with its regular churn of stories with eye-catching headlines about the perverse results of appeals in the tribunal system against Home Office decisions — for example, “Asylum seekers allowed to stay in UK despite lying in claims” or “Asylum seeker sold drugs days after deportation was cancelled” or “Migrant spared deportation because he has tattoos”, ad infinitum and ad nauseam...
Part of the problem is that the size and complexity of immigration and asylum law defies comprehension. If you ask Google’s AI how many UK immigration statutes there are, its response is: “It is impossible to state a definitive number of UK immigration acts because new legislation is continually enacted and previous acts are often amended, rather than replaced entirely.”
The answer is not less than 13, starting with the Immigration Act 1971. The Supreme Court said in a 2013 judgment: “The Immigration Act 1971 is now more than 40 years old and it has not aged well. It is widely acknowledged to be ill-adapted to the mounting scale and complexity of the problems associated with immigration control.”
What is to be done? It is beyond the scope of this article to produce a detailed answer, but here’s a modest proposal. Everyone criticises the current system for its complexity and legalism. A reformer could do worse than chuck out the lawyers and judges and simplify the law. Rather than having to navigate the archipelago of courts and discretionary decision-making, a better system would see immigration control subject to oversight from Parliament, not the courts and activist lawyers. Ultimately who is here should be a political choice, not a legal right.
Discretionary decision-making is the issue, as it becomes controlled by graft.
ReplyDeleteLawyers get a bad press in this sort of field mostly because they represent their clients' positions to the best of their ability. Any one of us might be in the position of needing a lawyer, and would certainly not like it if they were restricted from doing that. Lawyers - in the strict sense of barristers and solicitors - do not make the decisions. That is down to magistrates, judges, and possibly juries. They are the ones who certainly should not be 'activist'; they are supposed to follow and interpret the law as created by Parliament. When they stretch and distort the meaning of the law (or blithely accept the stretches and distortions proposed by lawyers correctly attempting to win cases for their clients) - that where the problems arise.
ReplyDeleteThat judges are drawn from the pool of lawyers (barristers, in particular) is irrelevant; to do their jobs properly they are supposed to balance the cases made by the parties, not pick a side.
James - I agree, although the laws seem to need a great deal of clarifying too.
ReplyDeleteBarbarus - I'm sure you are right, magistrates, judges do seem inclined to blithely accept the stretches and distortions proposed by lawyers. Step one would be to reduce the number of laws and tighten up those left with some unambiguous rules and annual limits.
Presumably existing laws and immigration criteria were drafted with heavy input from lawyers, so it is these lawyers we need to 'chuck' as the article puts it.