MW (Liberia) v Secretary of State for the Home Department: CA 20 Dec 2007

The child was to come to the UK to stay with relatives. Permission was refused.
Held: To be allowed to come, it had to be shown that the child would be maintained here without recourse to public funds and by the people he or she was to stay with. In this case that support was to be supplemented by a third party. Such support was not maintenance as required by the Rules. Tuckey LJ said; ‘Third party arrangements of the kind in question in this case are necessarily more precarious and . . more difficult to verify. Furthermore the rules do not provide for undertakings to be taken from third parties. These are policy reasons which I think justified the amendment.’
Lawrence Collins LJ, ‘with some regret’, agreed with that construction of rule 297(v), but hoped ‘that consideration can be given to amending the rule, consistently with the policy considerations mentioned by Tuckey LJ . . to facilitate reunion where there is verifiable evidence of long-term support from third parties.’

Judges:

Tuckey, Lawrence Collins and Rimer LJJ

Citations:

[2007] EWCA Civ 1376, Times 15-Jan-2008, [2008] 1 WLR 1068, [2008] INLR 328, [2008] Imm AR 323

Links:

Bailii

Statutes:

Immigration Rules 297(v)

Jurisdiction:

England and Wales

Cited by:

CitedMahad (Previously referred to as AM) (Ethiopia) v Entry Clearance Officer SC 16-Dec-2009
The claimants each sought entry to be with members of their family already settled here. The Court was asked whether the new Immigration Rules imposed a requirement which permitted third party support by someone other than the nominated sponsor.
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.

Immigration, Children

Updated: 22 November 2022; Ref: scu.262938