Unaccompanied child refugees wrongly refused family reunification by the Home Office

Success in Safe Passage’s legal challenge against the Home Office brings hope that child refugees in Europe whose family reunification applications were wrongly refused could now be reunited with their family here in the UK. In a judgment handed down today, the High Court found that the Home Office policy on deciding family reunion applications under the EU’s rules was unlawful and misstated the law in significant ways.

Under the Home Office’s policy, over 500 unaccompanied child refugees had their application to reunite with their family in the UK under the EU’s family reunion rules rejected last year. These children were then stranded alone in Europe during a global pandemic, instead of safe with their families. As the EU’s family reunion rules stopped applying to the UK as a result of Brexit, it is now with the Home Office to reconsider cases and reunite families previously wrongly turned away. Those children who had family reunion claims wrongfully refused can now ask for their cases to be re-examined by the Home Office in order to be reunited with their loved ones.

Jennine Walker, Head of UK Legal and Arrivals at Safe Passage said, “Our success in this legal challenge will offer hope to many child refugees desperate to safely reunite with their families in the UK, who were wrongly turned away by the Home Office. It should never have taken court action for the Home Office to decide applications fairly and lawfully, and we urge the Government to put these wrongs right by swiftly reuniting those refugee families whose applications were refused.”  

Safe Passage were successful in arguing that the Home Office policy unlawfully advised case-workers to refuse applications simply because they had failed to complete the necessary enquiries in time to meet the deadlines under the EU’s rules. The policy was also found to be unlawful because it instructed case-workers not to obtain local authority assessments of family members in the UK unless the Home Office was satisfied there was a genuine family relationship, despite the fact that these assessments frequently helped case-workers in deciding that critical issue.

Even before the court’s judgment, Safe Passage’s legal action brought about significant changes to how the Home Office handled refugee family reunion applications. Under pressure from the legal challenge being issued by Safe Passage, the Home Office made some improvements to both policy and practice. Whilst these improvements did not go far enough, more separated families were successfully reunited.