Gaza families win legal challenge against Home Office refusal for family reunion requests
Palestinians walk past the ruins of houses destroyed during Israel’s military offensive, Gaza City, 20 March 2024
Katherine Hearst reports in Middle East Eye on 9 April 2024:
Palestinian families have won a legal case against the Home Office when an immigration tribunal found that the government department’s refusal to consider their reunion applications was “irrational and unreasonable”, and breached the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Judges ruled on Thursday in favour of two Palestinian families who brought charges against the Home Office in February after it refused requests to decide on visa applications before enrolling biometric data.
Existing visa guidelines require applicants to enrol biometric information at a Visa Application Centre (VAC) before submitting a visa application. As Gaza’s VAC is closed, the nearest is in Cairo, which is impossible for many Palestinians in Gaza to reach.
The families demonstrated that having a positive “in principle” decision would have assisted them in negotiating exit via Rafah and travelling to a VAC in Egypt, via the assistance of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, the Egyptian authorities or via bribes paid to Egyptian state-linked agencies that historically faciliated exits from Gaza.
Home Office guidelines state that biometric requirements can only be deferred in “exceptional circumstances” and if the applicants can demonstrate their journeys to a visa application centre were “unsafe”.
One of the families, referred to as “RM and others”, are parents with two children applying to join their daughter who is studying in the UK. The family are internally displaced in southern Gaza and living in an overcrowded apartment with no access to water, food and medical treatment, after being forced to flee their home by Israeli bombardment. They reported “acute mental distress”, with one family member feeling “suicidal” and another “unable to speak more than a few words”.
The other family, “WM”, is a mother with four young children who is applying to join her brother, a British citizen living in the UK. The family had been internally displaced twice, initially from their home in the Jabalia refugee camp in the north of Gaza and then from the al-Maghazi camp in central Gaza.
In both cases, the Home Office refused the family’s requests for a decision on their application without prior provision of biometrics on the basis that their circumstances were not “materially different to other people in Gaza” or “compelling as to make them exceptional”.
The court found these decisions to be a “disproportionate interference” with their “rights to respect for private and family life”.
But the families still have a long way to go in their visa application process. “We must remember that we are six months into current events and what the clients are getting is a decision on their applications. So we had to litigate to a very advanced stage only to get decisions out of the Home Office,” Juliane Heider, a solicitor for the Islington Law Centre told MEE. Islington Law Centre acted for one of the families in the recent litigation, along with the Migrants’ Law Project at Asylum Aid who acted for RM & Others.
“From here on, there are additional stages to the process, including appeals if the applications are refused by the Home Office. It’s a long and complex process at a time when what our clients who are in Gaza want and need is to urgently have their request to join their relatives in the UK granted,” Heider said.