UK Immigration News

UK immigration border staff have blasted Home Office plans to reintroduce fingerprinting by force on asylum seekers arriving on British shores from the Channel. A similar measure was scrapped in 2012 after sparking violence against Border Force agents and self-harm among asylum seekers who slashed their own fingerprints to avoid them being recorded.

 

UK Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, the Right Honourable Robert Buckland QC, has blasted UK immigration lawyers who ‘deliberately delay’ immigration cases by filing last-minute human rights claims. During an interview with the Daily Mail, Buckland accused immigration lawyers of ‘taking the British public for a ride.’

 

According to the Immigration Services Union (ISU), which represents many of the Home Office’s UK immigration border staff have not been briefed on how a new hotel quarantine system, expected to begin today, will work. The new hotel quarantine system is being introduced to protect the UK from new COVID-19 variants. 

 

Research carried out by Privacy International (PI) has raised concerns over the level of involvement that technology companies have in the UK immigration border regime. According to Privacy International, private technology companies face little accountability for their development and deployment of various technologies used across UK borders.

 

A report published by PI, titled ‘The UK’s privatised migration surveillance regime’, contains details of the role that dozens of private tech firms play in the UK’s immigration and border regime. 

Despite civil liberty fears, several firms have been given grants to develop COVID vaccine passports, according to a report published by The Daily Express. British citizens who have been inoculated may still be given a COVID passport, despite concerns that they could be discriminatory.

 

However, some politicians have backed the idea, including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis. The passports have been suggested as a way of allowing people to travel who have been vaccinated against the coronavirus.

Amid the ongoing row over visa-free touring for UK and EU musicians, the British government has rejected a petition signed by nearly 300,000 artists. MPs had agreed to debate the petition after gathering more than 280,000 signatures. However, the latest discussions resulted in the petition being rejected by ministers who continue to blame the EU for the debacle.