A medicine graduate awarded a place at the University of Oxford has failed in her bid to overturn the UK government’s refusal to give visas to students it says will go on to claim asylum.
Dr Rawan Raad is among a group of seven women who went to the High Court to challenge the “visa brake” that was imposed on students from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan in March by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood due to the number of people claiming asylum after they arrived.
Dr Raad holds a first-class honours degree in medicine but was forced to leave her native Sudan due to the civil war and now lives in the UAE. She was awarded a place at Oxford to study international health and tropical medicine through the Africa Oxford Initiative's Mastercard Scholarship, which has been held open for her.
In a Crowd Justice post seeking funds to help her legal challenge, Dr Raad said “ultimately, I intend to help rebuild Sudan’s decimated health system”.
Studying at Oxford “would mean a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me to gain knowledge about the design of health systems, global health policy and the architecture of humanitarian response, which will be desperately needed in postwar Sudan”.
Her case, she said, “is not just about me, or my place at Oxford” but “whether the UK government can lawfully bar hundreds of qualified students from some of the world's most conflict-affected countries from accessing higher education, without looking at who they are and what they intend”.
Two other Sudanese claimants, Razan Farah and Rawan Alim, who have also been displaced by the civil war, have places at British universities.
Dr Farah, who is currently living in Egypt, also has a first-class honours degree in medicine and was accepted to study applied digital health at Oxford. Saudi Arabia-based Ms Ali has a place on a master’s degree course in international public health at University College London.
Also challenging the visa brake is Shahira Sadat, a coder from Afghanistan, who has been offered a prestigious Chevening Scholarship to study for an IT master’s degree at the University of Sussex or the University of Bradford.
Lawyers for the students argued that the visa brake is unlawful because the policy discriminates against women from countries where their access to higher education is already severely restricted.
The measure imposes a blanket ban on people from the chosen countries studying in the UK, irrespective of whether they wish to return to their homeland afterwards.
This is also regardless of whether they have established lives outside their country of nationality, hold long-term residence rights elsewhere, or can demonstrate compelling reasons why they should not be subject to the rules, the court was told.
The lawyers also challenged the “conversion rate” of student visas to asylum visas in the year ending September 2025, which the Home Office has used to impose the brake on students from the four countries.
They argued this was an “arbitrary” move, which said nothing about the rate at which student visa holders from the affected nationalities had historically claimed asylum. The Home Secretary had also failed to consider or undertake reasonable inquiries into whether there was evidence of “visa abuse”, the lawyers added.
They argued that by failing to allow each student’s application to be considered individually, Ms Mahmood had carried out “fettering of discretion”. This is the principle whereby public bodies must not refuse to assess an application, nor reject it out of hand.
But Judge Karen Steyn rejected the lawyers' claims, saying the Home Secretary is not obliged to be “concerned with immigration and border control as an appropriate vehicle for addressing the consequences of discrimination abroad”.
Ms Justice Steyn said other routes were available for the students to apply under the so-called Leave Outside the Rules system, a discretionary power used by the Home Office to allow entry, or stay, for someone who does not meet standard visa criteria.
She said she rejected the contention that the Home Secretary “could not rationally derive any indication of misuse of the student visa route”.
