In November of 2008 the government’s Identity and Passport Service issued draft regulations to be implemented as secondary legislation to the Identity Cards Act 2006, which received royal assent on 30 March 2006.
From 3 March 2009 nationals of Bolivia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Venezuela will all have to apply for visas if they wish to visit the United Kingdom. So will South Africans, unless they have visited the UK before using the passport they currently hold.
Back in November of last year an extensive statement of changes in the Immigration Rules (HC 113) implemented Tiers 2 and 5 of the United Kingdom Border Agency’s points based system. It also introduced a distinct category for business and special visitors and introduced new routes for visiting sportspeople and entertainers, based on previous concessions.
The UK Border Agency (UKBA) has announced that Tier 4 of its “points based system” will become operational at the end of March 2009.
There were five Claimants applying for judicial review in R on the application of Low & others v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2009] EWHC 35 (Admin). The first three Claimants were Chinese nationals who had been contracted to work for the fourth Claimant, a company providing catering services based in Ireland, and who at the time of their arrests in the United Kingdom had been working for the fifth Claimant, a Chinese restaurant in the UK.
Gherson is aware of an increasing number of refusals of applications made by people from within the United Kingdom to “vary” their existing leave to remain (either by extending their leave to remain in the same immigration category or by switching into a different category) where the refusal is because the applicant has failed to register with the police.
For many years the Court of Appeal’s judgment in R (Mahmood) v Home Secretary [2001] 1 WLR 840 represented what often seemed like a very solid and very thick brick wall preventing anyone who had established a family life in the United Kingdom from succeeding in showing that his or her rights protected by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights were unnecessarily and disproportionately violated by a decision to remove him or her from the United Kingdom.
As the Path to Citizenship Green Paper announced nearly a year ago – the new Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill introduces the operation of a kind of “earned citizenship” of the UK. The bill was partially published in draft form in July of last year. The complete bill received its first reading in the House of Lords on Wednesday 15 January of 2009.
The government has announced sweeping changes to nationality and citizenship legislation
The UK Government has announced that Tiers 2 and 5 of the new Australian styled points based system (PBS) will commence on 27th November 2008. These Tiers cover skilled and temporary workers wishing to come to the United Kingdom to work.