R (Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants) v Secretary of State for the Home Department
[1997] 1 WLR 275
Ratio Decidendi
Regulations that deny welfare benefits to asylum seekers who fail to claim asylum on arrival render the right to claim asylum under the Refugee Convention nugatory and are therefore ultra vires.
ข้อเท็จจริง
The Social Security (Persons from Abroad) Miscellaneous Amendments Regulations 1996 removed entitlement to income support and housing assistance from asylum seekers who did not claim asylum immediately on arrival in the UK or whose claims had been refused. The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants challenged the regulations as unlawful.
สรุปคำพิพากษา
The Court of Appeal held the regulations ultra vires. Simon Brown LJ held that rendering asylum seekers destitute by denying them all benefits effectively made the statutory right to claim asylum nugatory. The regulations were so draconian that they amounted to the executive frustrating a right conferred by Parliament under the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993.
คำกล่าวสำคัญ
"Parliament cannot have intended a significant number of genuine asylum seekers to be impaled on the horns of so intolerable a dilemma: the need either to abandon their claims to refugee status or alternatively to maintain them as best they can but in a state of utter destitution."
— Simon Brown LJ
การอ้างอิงภายหลัง
A foundational case on the relationship between welfare provision and the effective exercise of legal rights.
Parliament responded with the National Assistance Act 1948 arrangements and later the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, creating the separate asylum support system (NASS).