Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER
Case No: UI-2025-003245
FTT No’s: HU/60717/2023
IA/00321/2024

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:
On 5 February 2026

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE BRUCE

Between

UK (PAKISTAN)
(anonymity order made)
Appellant
and

ENTRY CLEARANCE OFFICER, SHEFFIELD
Respondent

Representation:

For the Appellant: Mr Olabamiji, Solicitor
For the Respondent: Ms Blackburn, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

Anonymity

Unless and until a tribunal or court directs otherwise, the Appellant is granted anonymity. No report of these proceedings shall directly or indirectly identify her, any of her witnesses or any member of her family. This direction applies to, amongst others, both the Appellant and the Respondent. Failure to comply with this direction could lead to contempt of court proceedings

Heard at Melville St, Edinburgh on the 5 February 2026

DECISION AND REASONS

1. The Appellant is a national of Pakistan born in 1976. She appeals with permission against the decision of the First-tier Tribunal to dismiss her appeal on human rights grounds.

2. The background to this appeal is as follows.

3. The Appellant was at a young age married to a man in Pakistan. For the purpose of this appeal he shall be referred to as Muhammad. Between 1998 and 2010 they had five children. They lived with Muhammad’s parents in Sialkot, Pakistan. This was not however Muhammad’s only family. Entry Clearance Records show that in 2006 he successfully applied for entry to the UK as an unmarried partner of an EEA national. He thereafter spent most of his time in Scotland, returning to Pakistan only occasionally. He and his partner in the UK and children of their own. In 2019 he decided that he wanted to bring his children from Pakistan to live with him and his other family here in the UK. The Appellant was left in Pakistan with his parents. I am not told if the Appellant ever consented to this arrangement.

4. Muhammad and the children all entered the UK on the 21 May 2019. They lived first in Manchester, and then moved to Glasgow. They lived with Muhammad’s partner and his children from that relationship. On 4 July 2021 the children all moved out of that property, with the assistance of social services. Allegations were made that Muhammad had been physically abusing the children, allegations which subsequently were proven before the Sheriff’s Court in Hamilton. A non-molestation order was imposed on Muhammad, preventing him from having any contact with his eldest two daughters; in fact he has had no contact with any of the five children since that date. In separate court proceedings on 11 March 2023 the eldest daughter, ‘R’, then aged 24, was granted a residence order and parental rights over her minor siblings.

5. I am told that all of the children have now been naturalised as British citizens, bar the eldest, R, who has indefinite leave to remain and a settlement application pending.

6. It was against that background that the children, specifically ‘M’, a girl born in 2010, supported an application for entry clearance from her mother, the Appellant, in Pakistan. That application was made within weeks of the residence order being granted placing her in the care of her elder sister.

7. None of these facts were contested by the Respondent in the refusal notice dated 24 August 2023. Entry Clearance was however refused on the basis that there was insufficient evidence to show that the Appellant had ‘sole responsibility’ for M, since M’s father remained in the UK, the couple were not formally divorced and M was additionally under the lawful care of her sister R. Nor could the Appellant meet the eligibility requirements regarding income or English language ability. The Respondent’s consideration of whether there are here ‘exceptional circumstances’ justifying entry ‘outside of the rules’ on Article 8 grounds was limited to an observation that R had not ceded parental responsibility for M upon her recent marriage.

8. The Appellant appealed and on the 23 September 2024 the appeal came before a judge of the First-tier Tribunal sitting in Glasgow.

9. Again, none of the material facts, as I have summarised them above, were contested. The appeal was nevertheless dismissed on the grounds that the Appellant could not meet the requirements of the Rules, and there were no exceptional circumstances justifying entry clearance.

10. Permission was granted to the Upper Tribunal on the 29 September 2025 by Upper Tribunal Judge Rastogi.

Errors of Law

11. Before me Ms Blackburn relied on a ‘Rule 24’ response dated 4 November 2025. I have read and taken the submissions in that document into account, but I am wholly satisfied the decision of the First-tier Tribunal is flawed for several errors of law and it must be set aside.

12. The first error is a repeated failure to take material matters into account.

13. In its analysis of whether the Appellant can be said to have ‘sole responsibility’ for M – a matter relevant to the rules but also to the wider Article 8 assessment - the Tribunal said the following:

13. The Appellant is not divorced from the sponsor’s father. There are no documents to suggest that such steps are contemplated or have been undertaken. The sponsor’s father still resides in the UK along with all of the sponsor’s siblings. The Appellant does not dispute that she continued her relationship with the sponsor’s father, leading to her birth, from 2006. The fact that the Appellant continues to reside with her partner’s father (and family) in Pakistan is material to this decision.

14. I note the statement from the Appellant’s father - in - law supporting the Appellant’s claim. To a degree there is a distinct benefit accruing to him, if the claim is successful. That is, he will have one less person in his household to be responsible for. In having her move to the UK, he removes the embarrassment accruing to his family as a result of the Family Court proceedings and Orders. It would be fair to observe that there is a self-serving element to his statement.

15. I also take into account that there have been legal proceedings against the Appellant’s partner which has been founded upon domestic abuse of his daughter, wherein the sponsor came to the attention of social services. Consequently court orders were made in favour of the Appellant’s elder sister Rafia, granting Care and Residence of the sponsor to the sister.

16. That sister is her legal guardian, is possessed of parental rights attendant thereto, and she has taken no steps to withdraw of resile from this position. Some legal act is required to put this into effect. None are taken or contemplated. These orders will not completely usurp the Appellant’s parental rights as the sponsor’s mother.

14. I am satisfied that the Tribunal has here failed to have regard to the following matters:

i) Whether a woman in rural Pakistan would have the legal standing or social capital to divorce her errant husband, particularly in circumstances where she is entirely dependent on his family for survival;

ii) In discounting the evidence of M’s paternal grandfather the Tribunal failed to consider the possibility that a child’s grandfather might want to support this application because he has the best interests of his grandchild in mind;

iii) That the application had been supported by all members of the family, M’s Principal Teacher, a clinical psychologist, and by a Barnado’s Care Support Worker, all of whom recognised that the person best placed to be caring for M on a day to day basis was her mother.

15. The findings are further unsupported by reasoning. It is not for instance clear how the removal of the Appellant from her father-in-law’s home would “remove the embarrassment accruing” from his son’s behaviour.

16. The First-tier Tribunal’s decision goes on:

19. There is no evidence from any independent source that the Appellant is, or has played any role in the sponsor’s life, save for at best a minor role. The school, social services, GP, and psychologist, do not make any reference to such input. If there was any, it is reasonable to infer that they would be aware of it, to make suitable comment.

20. In regard to the psychologist's report I note the comments therein. I am not prepared to afford it full weight. The author does not make reference to what other documents she may have used to assess the Appellant, such as school reports, GP notes and records, social services reports, social work reports prepared for the domestic abuse hearings or similar. The absence of considering these documents in light of what she was asked to report upon by the Appellants representative, persuades me that the report has a particularly biassed and focused view, and is not as reliable as one might normally expect. It is for the psychologist to advise why these other documents were not provided, or relied upon in the preparation of the report.

17. The central challenge mounted in the grounds concerns paragraph 19, where, it is submitted, the First-tier Tribunal took an irrational approach to the views of an expert witness, the clinical psychologist Dr Natalie Borden.

18. As a matter of fact, it is correct to say that Dr Borden does not, unfortunately, set out what documents she had access to when she prepared her report. As the Rule 24 response points out, that was a valid criticism when one has regard to the jurisprudence of the Tribunal: HA (expert evidence; mental health) Sri Lanka [2022] UKUT 00111 and JL (medical reports-credibility) China [2013] UKUT 00145. In circumstances where none of the material facts were in issue, however, it is hard to see the relevance of that omission. The central function of Dr Borden’s report was to confirm what M herself had already told the court, a matter which was not, I stress again, in any way contested:

“[M]’s responses on the CORE-OM did indicate that she was currently anxious about her future and that her mood could be low at times and she felt tearful often. On exploring her responses in more detail, [M] explained that she has remained in frequent, close contact with her mother since she moved to Scotland via telephone and that she misses her terribly. She described having a close bond with her mother and that her mother would be who she would turn to when she had problems. She added that she can go through periods where she misses her mother so much that she is unable to stop crying”.

19. It is not difficult to see why this child would miss her mother, and Dr Borden quite properly goes on to give her professional opinion on how the separation is likely to have impacted on M. This was not however a case which turned on M having any particular mental health diagnosis. It involved a simple human assessment of whether this child’s best interests would be served by being with her mother. It is hard to see how the absence of, for instance, M’s GP notes could have made a difference to the quality of that report, which was almost entirely based on Dr Borden’s interviews with family members about how they felt, and how they thought M felt. There was in my view absolutely no basis upon which the Tribunal could have rationally characterised her report as “biassed” .

20. I add that I found the reasoning at paragraph 19 of the First-tier Tribunal decision to be unfathomable. The Appellant is M’s mother. She was M’s primary carer for her entire life, until Muhammad decided to bring M to the UK with him. All of the unchallenged evidence in this appeal – from M, from her siblings, from her teacher and care worker, from Dr Borden – it all went one way, and it was not that mother had “at best a minor role” in her daughter’s life.

21. There has already been a significant delay in the resolution of this case. The Appellant applied to be reunited with her child on 6 June 2023, and any further delay would be contrary to the overriding objective. I therefore indicated to the parties that I intended to proceed to remake the decision in the appeal on the evidence before me. At that stage Ms Blackburn asked for some time to consider her position, which was granted.

The Decision Re-Made

22. When the hearing resumed, Ms Blackburn indicated that the appeal was no longer opposed. She invited me to find that the public interest in maintaining the refusal was outweighed by the matters in favour of the Appellant, and asked me to allow the appeal on Article 8 grounds.

23. I consider that this was a concession wholly justified in law on the exceptional facts of this case. In light of the ECOs position I need not set out my reasoning, or reference the evidence, in any great detail but do so for the sake of completeness.

24. It is in the public interest to refuse entry clearance to persons who cannot meet the requirements of the rules. It is not in issue that the Appellant cannot meet the requirements of the rules relating to either financial support or English language ability, and these matters too must weigh against her. There is therefore, by virtue of s11B Nationality Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, a significant public interest in refusing to grant entry clearance.

25. The accepted facts that have in this case outweighed that public interest are as follows:

• There is a family life between mother and daughter

• The Appellant was M’s primary carer until she was removed from her care, and the two have maintained close contact by ‘modern means of communication’ ever since

• M had no say in where she was taken to live, and so the separation was not of her making

• M was brought here on the basis that she would be living with a parent. That arrangement broke down as the result of physical abuse perpetrated by that parent against M and her siblings. The consequence is that M is living in this country without the care of a biological parent

• Although R has taken on parental responsibility for M she did so in very difficult circumstances, and at a very young age herself. R is now married, and I am told is expecting a baby. Whilst R is to be commended for her maturity and responsibility towards her siblings, M is not her daughter and she should not be required to assume responsibility for her indefinitely in circumstances where there is a biological parent who is able and willing to do so

• It is strongly in M’s best interests that her mother is able to live with and care for her. As Dr Borden’s report makes clear, these children, and in particular M, have suffered great distress at separation from their mother. There are no countervailing factors to gainsay the assumption that it is generally speaking in the best interest of a child to live with this parent

• It is strongly in M’s best interests that this be in the UK, where she has naturalised as a British national, where she has put down roots and where she maintains a close relationship with her siblings

Decision and Directions

26. The decision of the First-tier Tribunal is set aside.

27. The appeal is allowed by consent. In view of the fact that this is an appeal which involves a vulnerable child, who has already waited over 2 ½ years for this matter to be resolved, I direct that the ECO expedite the grant of entry clearance to the Appellant.

28. Judge Rastogi made an order for anonymity in this appeal, in light of the orders of the family court. That is maintained. Any reporting which indirectly leads to the identification of this family will be in contempt of that order.

Upper Tribunal Judge Bruce
Immigration and Asylum Chamber
5 February 2026