A family of six Palestinians from Gaza slipped through what British Prime Minister Keir Starmer described as a “loophole” this week and immigrated to the United Kingdom using a program designed for Ukrainian refugees.
The Palestinian family — consisting of mother, father, and four children aged 18, 17, 8, and 7 — applied for entry to the United Kingdom last year under the Ukraine Family Scheme after their home was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike during the Gaza war. The brother of the family’s father has lived in the U.K. since 2007 and has British citizenship.
The Ukraine Family Scheme was, as the name implies, designed to make obtaining a visa easier for Ukrainian families fleeing the Russian invasion of their homeland. The program allows Ukrainian nationals to join family members already living in the U.K. for up to three years.
The Palestinian family acknowledged they were not Ukrainian, but argued that a “compelling and compassionate” reading of the law would make an exception in their case.
The British Home Office rejected the Palestinian family’s application last May, but they appealed the rejection to an immigration tribunal judge in September.
The first appeal was rejected, but the case ultimately wound up before an upper tribunal judge, who upheld the Palestinian family’s appeal in January by citing an article from the European Convention on Human Rights (EHCR) that guarantees a “right to family life.”
Much of the British political establishment rushed to condemn the judge’s ruling, pointing out that Gaza has a huge number of potential refugees and the U.K. cannot absorb them all. Some also criticized the judge for rewriting British government policies on the fly.
“The UK has generously helped people in Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, and Hong Kong with specific humanitarian schemes. We cannot have judges simply making up new schemes based on novel and expansive interpretations of human rights law,” said shadow home secretary Chris Philp.
The judge, Hugo Norton-Taylor, dismissed the “floodgates” argument and said only his superior judgment of the facts of the case allowed this particular appeal to succeed, particularly his assessment that the family’s youngest children were at “high risk of death or serious injury on a daily basis” if they remained in Gaza.
The judge also said the absence of a government program for Palestinian refugees was a “significant” consideration in his decision to stretch the Ukrainian refugee program to accommodate the appellants. The Home Office said in October it had “no current plans” to offer a comparable Gaza visa scheme.
The Home Office said it “contested this claim rigorously at both the first and upper tier tribunal,” but lost on the “narrow facts of this specific case.”
“Nevertheless, we are clear that there is no resettlement route from Gaza and we will continue to contest any future claims that do not meet our rules,” the Home Office added.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch told Prime Minister Keir Starmer the judge’s decision was “completely wrong” and “cannot be allowed to stand.”
“We cannot be in a situation where we allow enormous numbers of people to exploit our laws in this way,” she said.
“This case has arisen because a Palestinian came to the U.K. from Gaza in 2007, he is now a British citizen,” Badenoch pointed out.
“This is precisely why we need to break the conveyor belt from arriving in the U.K., to acquiring indefinite leave to remain, and then a British passport, and now a right to bring six family members here as well,” she said.
Starmer agreed that “it should be Parliament that makes the rules on immigration,” although he accused Badenoch and the Conservatives of creating the current dilemma by supporting “open borders” when they were in power.
“It should be the government that makes the policy, that is the principle, and the home secretary is already looking at the legal loophole which we need to close in this particular case,” he said.
However, Starmer grew evasive when Badenoch asked if his office was prepared to appeal the tribunal decision in the case of the Palestinian family, repeatedly insisting he would “change the law and close the loophole” without committing to an appeal. Starmer also proved unable to articulate exactly what “loophole” his government might be closing.
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