Gazan families blocked from entering Britain under Ukraine scheme after government appeal

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has decision by senior immigration tribunal overturned

The Home Secretary has won her bid to prevent the family of six from coming to live in the UK. EPA

The UK’s Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has successfully appealed against a court verdict which allowed a family in Gaza to apply for entry to the UK under a scheme devised for Ukrainian refugees.

The family of six, who were last known to be living in a tent in the Nuseirat refugee camp, were granted permission to come to the UK to live with the father’s brother in September last year. But the Home Office challenged the decision, with the Court of Appeal ruling in the government’s favour on Wednesday.

Citing Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights, the family and the brother in the UK had successfully argued that not being allowed to come to the UK would be a breach of the article’s “right to family life”.

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In line with Home Office guidelines which ask applicants to chose “the route which most closely matches your circumstances”, the family applied through a scheme devised for Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion. That form is the only one related to people fleeing war zones.

The family are said to be at increased risk in Gaza owing to their “anti-Hamas profile” in addition to the “indiscriminate and lethal attacks” from Israel’s military campaign.

“Their position is extremely dangerous. Law and order have broken down in Gaza and there is a dire humanitarian situation,” the court acknowledged. But the judges agreed with government lawyers that family dependents do not apply to adult siblings, and that children living in a war zone was not a “trump card” for admission into the UK.

The Home Secretary has agreed to stand by the entry clearance the family were given last year, which means they will still be able to come to the UK if they are able to leave Gaza. But the judgment sets a precedent for other refugees seeking to apply for entry to the UK through the Ukrainian scheme and Article 8 of the ECHR.

The judges concluded that though the brother in the UK was supporting his brother in Gaza, this was not enough to show that the family were his dependents. The Home Secretary had argued that the Upper Tribunal’s decision to allow the family into the UK also went against the government’s immigration policies.

The judges agreed with this position and said the Upper Tribunal had “wrongly” given too much weight to the family and the children’s plight.

“Put bluntly, the [Home Secretary] argued that the UK has no duty to protect the lives of foreign nationals in a foreign country, just because they enjoy some family life with someone lawfully in the UK,” they said. “Ultimately we agree … that the children’s best interests were wrongly treated by the Upper Tribunal as paramount (in other words as a trump card),” they said.

The court also said the immigration tribunals needed to take the Home Secretary’s policies into account, and that the issue was a “question of response for the UK’s laws and democratic process … to protect and economic well-being of the UK and the rights of its citizens”.

It comes days after Ms Mahmood said she would be looking at new ways of limiting Article 8.

“The courts have adopted an ever-expanding interpretation of this right,” she said in a statement last week. “Many people have been allowed to come to this country, when they would otherwise have had no right to, and we have been unable to remove others when the case for doing so seems overwhelming,” she said.