Asylum Aid

Freshfields represented Asylum Aid in High Court proceedings that resulted in the quashing of unlawful Immigration Rules that risked separating stateless people from their children and partners.

The challenge

The challenge was brought in response to the Home Secretary changing the Immigration Rules to restrict the ability of the children and partners of stateless people to join or remain with them in the UK.

The changes were introduced in 2023 and imposed stringent new evidential hurdles or, alternatively, an extremely high “exceptional circumstances” test. Asylum Aid, a leading migrants’ rights charity, feared that “many stateless people and their families would find it impossible to meet these requirements in practice.”

In particular, applicants faced a £29,000 minimum income threshold, along with application fees of up to £1,846 and an annual Immigration Health Surcharge of £1,035 per person. Even successful applicants would generally receive only 2.5 years’ leave at a time, requiring repeated, and often expensive, applications over a decade.

Stateless people are among the most vulnerable and marginalised people in society. Asylum Aid describes them as “often invisible – they have no documents, no rights and no state protection… they cannot work, marry, study, open a bank account or drive, and they are especially vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation.”

The changes also undermined the UK’s statelessness determination procedure, which Asylum Aid had played a central role in establishing a decade earlier. The charity instructed Freshfields with a clear remit: to advise on the legality of the changes and, if they were unlawful, represent it in a judicial review seeking to restore the previous legal framework.

Building the case

Freshfields played a central role in identifying, designing, and implementing the litigation strategy from the outset. Judicial review proceedings against central government are subject to strict deadlines and inherently difficult to win. The team mastered a complex framework of domestic legislation, international treaties, and detailed Home Office guidance at speed.

The team, led by William Robinson and Zaid Fathoala, conducted initial research and advised on preliminary matters before assembling and drafting several witness statements, policy evidence and legal submissions within weeks of being instructed. The team also handled pre-action correspondence, pleadings, counsel instructions, bundling, filing and court deadlines, while advising on the charity’s adverse costs risk.

Freshfields secured a Costs Capping Order limiting Asylum Aid’s exposure to £20,000, without which Asylum Aid would have been unable to proceed with the case. In total, the firm contributed more than 2,500 hours of pro bono time and approached the case with the same rigour and sophistication it would apply to a fee-earning public law dispute.

A judgment with lasting impact

In February 2025, following a final hearing, the High Court upheld three of the four grounds advanced by Asylum Aid: irrationality, breach of the statutory public sector equality duty and breach of the statutory duty to have regard to the need to promote and safeguard the welfare of children.

The court quashed the relevant rules. It described the policy as “a paradigm example of a perverse policy” and found that the Home Secretary had “not justified the very significant impact on the vulnerable dependants of stateless persons, in particular children.”

The Home Secretary did not appeal, and went on to update its guidance in July 2025 to confirm that the relevant sections had been quashed following the ruling.

The result ensures that hundreds of children and partners of stateless people will not face the unlawfully high financial and procedural barriers created by the rules. It also reinforces important principles of rational decision-making, equality duties and children’s rights, with wider implications for the protection of stateless people in the UK. The team instructed Stephanie Harrison KC and Emma Fitzsimmons (Garden Court Chambers), and the judgment has been reported (Asylum Aid v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025] EWHC 316 (Admin) [2025] 2 WLUK 791). 

Client perspective

“The team at Freshfields did an incredible job; they worked incredibly hard with unfailing enthusiasm and commitment to the importance of the issues. We felt very well supported throughout as a team – they kept us updated at all stages and gave clear advice on the merits and tactics. We were absolutely delighted with the result which is so important to stateless people.”

Alison Pickup, Chief Executive Officer, Helen Bamber Foundation Group (of which Asylum Aid is a constituent charity member)

A long-term partnership

Freshfields has a longstanding partnership with Asylum Aid and other organisations that help refugees and at-risk migrants enforce their rights. For more than 15 years, the firm has supported impact litigation and individual casework in this field, while also seconding trainees to Asylum Aid.

That combination of litigation capability, trust, and insight was central to the success of this case. Pro bono support was central to Asylum Aid being able to litigate a case of this scale against a central government department. The outcome secures systemic change for some of the most invisible and disadvantaged populations in the UK.

The team was awarded the British Legal Awards’ Outstanding Social Impact Award 2025 for their work on the case, and they were shortlisted for the Financial Times’ Innovative Lawyers’ Pro Bono Initiative of the Year Award 2026.