Introduction

Welcome to the Immigration Offences Blog – an attempt to be a guide to prosecuting and defending people who are charged with offences relating to illegal entry or stay to England or Wales. This came out of a series of lectures I’ve done over the years. I thought that it might be helpful to gather them all up into one place and keep them updated.

There are two parts. Firstly, a set of fact sheets covering the various criminal offences and criminal procedure in these cases. These will be added to slowly (I’m not paid to do this) and will be updated as and when the law changes.

The second part will be updates of all the cases I am aware of that is relevant to this area of law, as and when they are out. This will run as a feed on the Case Comment Page, but you can search by keyword/tags. This website is primarily aimed at lawyers – criminal solicitors or barristers who have a case with an immigration ‘flavour’ and immigration lawyers who want a bit more background about criminal proceedings that their clients may face or have faced.

 Searching – Keywords

When writing up a case, in order to make it easier to search, I’ll use the following keywords:

• Conviction – means there was an appeal against conviction
• CCRC – a referral by the Criminal Cases Review Commission
• Deportation – the question of deportation was discussed
• Guilty Plea – an appeal against conviction following a guilty plea
• Refugee – the s31 defence was discussed
• Sentence – appeal against sentence

Disclaimer

It probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. Nothing in this blog is legal advice, or should be taken as legal advice.Whilst every attempt is made to get the law correct and uptodate, always check it yourself and don’t rely on this.