DETENTION AND BAIL

What shall I do if I am detained ?

If you have been detained yourself by the UK Immigration Services or know someone who has been detained then you need to seek specialist legal advice from lawyers like ourselves.

You must act quickly because when a person is detained, this usually means that the immigration authorities plan to remove them in the next few days.

What steps can be taken to get a person released ?

An application to the UK Immigration Services for Temporary Admission or Temporary Release is possible, or an application for Chief Immigration Officer (CIO) for bail. Where a person has just been detained these are unlikely to be successful.

The alternative is to apply for ‘bail’ to the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal (AIT). This is an application for a person to be released subject to certain conditions, such as: 

• That they agree to pay an amount of money
• A friend or relative agrees to pay an amount of money
• That the person resides at a certain address
• They the person is electronically tagged
• That the person reports to the Immigration Service at a frequency of, for example, once a day, once a week or once a month

When is a bail application most likely to succeed ? 

This is a difficult question to answer, but some general guidance is possible:

• Where a person’s removal from the UK is not likely to be for several weeks or more, it is difficult to justify ongoing immigration detention and a bail application may well succeed
• Where removals to a certain country are not possible for practical or other reasons, detention would normally be unlawful and a bail application should succeed
• Where a person is a survivor of torture, they should not be detained
• Unaccompanied minors should never be detained other than for a very short period in their own best interests
• Families should not generally be detained other than for short periods before removal

My friend is in a removal centre. Is he entitled to bail ?

There is a presumption in English law that anyone detained is entitled to bail. This applies to detention removal centres as well as prisons.

The UK Immigration Services can only detain someone if they can show detention is necessary. The only group of people entitled to apply for bail are those who have not been in the UK for more than seven days.

You should contact us immediately as we are the lawyers who specialize in this and other areas of the UK immigration law, so we can help you or your friends in detention. Remember : the sooner you act, the sooner you may get out of detention !