Turpin Miller represented YS in a successful application for habeas corpus to obtain his release from Heathrow Immigration Removal Centre, where YS had been detained by the Home Office for the purpose of deporting him to France.
In June 2024, YS received a criminal conviction and sentence of 48 months.
Section 32 of the UK Borders Act 2007 requires the Home Office to pursue the deportation of anyone who is a “foreign criminal” as defined in that section – that is, anyone who is convicted of an offence in the UK which results in a sentence of over 12 months’ imprisonment “who is not a British citizen or an Irish citizen.” It is possible for Irish nationals to be deported from the UK using other legal powers, but it is longstanding Home Office policy that these will only be used in exceptional circumstances, such as where terrorist offences are involved (no such offending was involved here).
The Home Office, believing YS only held French nationality, served him with notice that he was liable to “automatic deportation” under section 32 of the UK Borders Act 2007. YS informed the Home Office that he was also an Irish citizen, due to his father having been born in Ireland in the 1940s. This would make him exempt from deportation under section 32, effectively exempt from deportation by use of alternative deportation powers, and not lawfully detainable under immigration detention powers.
Home Office enquiries in response to evidence provided by YS led them to wrongly conclude that although YS was entitled to Irish citizenship, he was not an Irish citizen. This caused the Home Office to consider that deporting YS to France and using immigration detention powers to detain him for this purpose at the end of his criminal custody was lawful.
With our assistance, YS lodged an application for Judicial Review seeking an order prohibiting his detention under immigration powers six days before his criminal custody ended. A judge issued an order on 23 May 2025 that there should be an urgent interim hearing but the Court later notified that the first available date for such a hearing would be late July. Meanwhile, the Home Office continued to maintain YS was not an Irish citizen and that his detention for deportation to France was lawful, notwithstanding YS providing a report from an expert in Irish nationality law which confirmed that he was already Irish.
Considering that an interim hearing in July was inadequate, given that YS was now being detained by the Home Office under immigration powers on the basis of a mistake about his nationality which it appeared could and should be finally resolved by the Court urgently, YS filed an application for habeas corpus on 3 June 2025.
Applications for habeas corpus are treated with extreme urgency by the courts and will be listed for urgent court hearings where there appears to be justification for the application (applications can be immediately refused in other circumstances).
The application resulted in an Order on the same day for an urgent hearing on Friday 06 June 2025. It was agreed to adjourn this hearing to Monday 09 June 2025, by which time the Home Office had conceded that YS was Irish, and that there was no exercisable power to deport him or to detain him for the purposes of deportation. YS was released on the same day and the Home Office were ordered to pay YS’s legal costs.
YS was represented by Mike Poulter of Turpin Miller’s Public Law and Human Rights Team, instructing Grainne Mellon in the Judicial Review claim and David Sellwood in the habeas corpus application.