Immigration

- You have to register your Asylum claim. Now I should say that ideally you'd be wanting to get legal advice before you even claim Asylum because during an asylum they call it a screening interview they will be asking fairly basic questions about how you got here and the basic questions about why you're claiming Asylum. 

Even at that early stage everything's recorded everything's taken down so if you're saying something which you later maybe are not totally consistent about that will be held against you so you need to be careful even at that early stage of registering your Asylum claim.

- So screen interview sounds quite daunting would I have you with me as someone like yourself 

- So well it kind of depends what your funding is so if it's legal aid then unfortunately that initial screening interview itself is not covered. The stage after that is to have your main asylum interview and again for that the children they are covered by legal aid, otherwise generally legal aid doesn't cover attendance by a legal representative at that interview. 

However what a good legal representative should be doing is preparing you really well before the interview, making you familiar with what questions might come up and perhaps preparing a witness statement in advance of the interview as well.

- So that's reassuring so you're there with every step of the way if we want to go through it.

- That's right.

- What happens next then?

- Okay so you have your main interview, you may submit a witness statement as well and then you may have evidence to submit to support your claim so you know if you've come from a certain country where you're there might be documentary evidence to support your case or there might be objective evidence there might be country reports from academics that support your claim of persecution. 

So you get all this off to the Home Office and then you're really waiting for a decision and unfortunately particularly at the moment that has taken a long time to come through and then you ultimately you either get a positive or a negative decision.

- I can imagine with that witness statement it's probably a lot back and forth between yourselves and the client just to agree that and it's a lot of reiterations until me the client is happy with it?

- Absolutely yeah I mean they can be really detailed and they should really have quite a bit of detail in them so that can be the probably the biggest single part of your job as an asylum case worker.

- Out of Interest what's the longest you've ever drafted? 

- We're definitely getting on to 30 plus pages so yeah pretty significant.

- Thank God we've got computers!

- Yes absolutely!

- And what happens next then from that point of view?

- Okay so everything's with the home office they're then taking their time to make a decision and either you're going to be granted Refugee status or if you're less fortunate you'll have a refusal and then the sort of standard next step would be to lodge an appeal with the Immigration Tribunal against that refusal.

- And then does that then come to an end or is then more after that?

- Well so you'd have your case put before an immigration judge and that's for many people that's their big sort of second chance to succeed with their case they can normally introduce new evidence in the appeal and you'd normally have a specialist either an immigration solicitor a barrister present the case in the tribunal and then if your appeal the judge has to make a decision on your appeal and if it's positive again you'll be granted refugee status.

If it's refused then you can normally appeal onwards to the higher tribunals and then onwards 

- What kind of percentage normally do you go on to the higher courts?

- I mean it is interesting I think currently there's most cases are succeeding by the time you get to the first year tribunal so I believe it's over half at the moment. I mean your prospects do decrease unfortunately if you don't succeed at the first tribunal hearing there's a kind of like tapering off it gets less likely the higher up you go.

- And I suppose it's costly to keep going?

- So eventually it can be yeah if you're not covered by legal aid

- What are some of the most common misconceptions on the part of an asylum or immigration case?

- I guess quite often a kind of misconception you'll have near the start is where an asylum applicant for example will kind of think they've got this very smooth fluid process that you'll just be able to kind of sail through. So really making sure you can set expectations early on is important because unfortunately the asylum process isn't straightforward you can get through it but it can be a bit of a rocky road.

- I suppose you're beholden to processes and time frames?

- There's no escaping it I guess a kind of common thing you'll hear is that a family or friend had a certain experience and maybe they got their visa or permission to stay relatively quickly so my client now might expect that same process but it's really getting across that each case is different you can't really compare one case with another. 

- I suppose that as a legal advisor you just have to take it case by case, there's no one size fits all yeah 

- Absolutely yeah: different backgrounds mean they're going to be treated differently and also at the Home Office they sometimes they're operating really efficiently so you'll get a quick decision then sometimes there is an enormous backlog