The enthusiasm of successive Governments for legislation in the area of immigration far exceeds their capacity to implement it. Those who find themselves in the state of cultural revolution that is contemporary immigration law are very much in the debt of the authors of this book for their great efforts to present a snapshot of the law before the kaleidoscope moves round again.
Abandoning the looseleaf format of the previous edition, we are presented with a hardback volume of 1,346 pages of text, entirely free of any source materials. Although it covers all the essentials, a major focus of the book concerns those who come to work in the UK. There is a long chapter devoted to "EU law and Movement of Free Persons" (as it is rather curiously called), and five more devoted to the points-based system. As the proposed supplement anticipates, it may be that the latter are too closely tied to the wording of the current scheme to have lasting value. However, the introduction is useful and accurately anticipates some of the problems with the scheme, including the one that led Mrs Ann Gloag and the First Minister to intervene in April on behalf of an immigrant who had fallen foul of its inflexibility.
As in previous editions, there is a good deal of opinion here in which the experience of the authors is apparent. Their humane good sense will make this book a necessary stop where thorough research of a point is required.
This is, however, a book entirely focused on England; Scotland does not occur in the index or in the treatment of court proceedings. There is no treatment of the issue of whether a decision of the tribunal is made in Scotland or England. Common law jurisdictional issues between Scotland and England are dealt with under the heading "Burden of Proof in the chapter on evidence and proof. This is, of course, not to say that the book is not useful, given that most of the law in this area comes from south of the border.
Inevitably, the enormity of the task has weighed rather heavily on those concerned. Despite the excellent example of the Clayton & Tomlinson "all cases" table, there are three tables of cases - "Table of Cases", "Before ECJ", and "Before ECHR". All pages of these three tables are headed "Table of Cases". Not surprisingly, this has confused even the compiler of the lists, with the result that some citations of, for example, the Bensaid case appear in the third table, white others occur in the first.
More substantively, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child does not feature in the section on children, despite the UK having in September 2008 lifted reservations relating to immigration and children in custody with adults. Paragraph 1.14 is out of date in this regard. Nor does it occur in the treatment of article 8, despite the June 2008 Grand Chamber decision of the ECtHR in Maslov v Austria, citing the article that makes the best interests of the child a primary consideration in all actions concerning children undertaken by courts of law or administrative authorities.
Such carping aside, those engaged in this field will find this book largely up to date and authoritative.
Mungo Bovey QCQ
The Journal Online - The members’ magazine of the Law Society of Scotland
September 2009
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