Bordering Asylum in Post-Brexit Britain

Abstract

This article considers UK government’s proposal to re-introduce an accelerated appeals system for detained asylum seekers through resort to legislation. Previously, a similar system, the ‘Detained Fast Track’, was ruled unlawful largely on the basis that it lacked procedural fairness, a core tenet of the rule of law. This article examines the interplay between the rule of law and international human rights law. It adopts a formal notion of the rule of law to assess its effectiveness in protecting asylum seeker’s rights, as a sub-group of ‘unwanted migrants’. This is applied to a case study of the previous system and legal challenges to it to explore the deficiency of legality of the system and the effectiveness of judicial review. Three stages of the previous system are examined, its inception, its survival of early legal challenges and its eventual demise to expose the marginalisation of international human rights safeguards.