Does the UK Home Office care about the rule of law? Implications for “unwanted migrants”

The instrumentalisation of law for the purposes of creating a ‘hostile environment’ and deterring ‘unwanted migration’ is particularly visible in the UK. The new Nationality and Borders Act 2022 contains proposals on asylum which show a rejection of international law norms and conventions, without having had the political courage to put that rejection squarely to the public. That is not new. Right from the emergence of asylum as a political issue in the 1980’s, the lukewarm official ‘welcome’ never quite hid the stance of disbelief which underlay the UK’s legal and procedural responses. A parallel process, beginning even earlier but accelerating from 2010 onwards, has taken place in UK domestic immigration law. New legislation, Immigration Rules, policies, application procedures and litigation practices show diminishing respect for rule of law principles. This article uses simple and hopefully uncontroversial definitions of international law norms and accepted common law rule of law principles against which to analyse and critique key aspects of UK immigration control. It concludes that UK policies and practice have over time displayed an increasing hostility to those norms and principles, resorting to ignorant and even brazen indifference to facts, evidence, and analysis, and widening the gap between domestic and international law in important respects.