Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER Case No: UI-2026-000049
First-tier Tribunal No: HU/00550/2025

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:

On 9th of June 2026

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE HIRST

Between

Emmanuel Moyosere Ogeifo
(NO ANONYMITY ORDER MADE)
Appellant
and

Secretary of State for the Home Department
Respondent

Representation:
For the Appellant: Mr Georget, instructed by Nandy & Co Solicitors
For the Respondent: Mr Tufan, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

Heard at Field House on 8 April 2026

DECISION AND REASONS

1. The Appellant appeals from the decision of the First-tier Tribunal dated 16 September 2025 dismissing his appeal on human rights grounds.
2. For the reasons set out below I have decided that the First-tier Tribunal’s decision involved the making of a material error of law. The decision is set aside and the appeal will be reheard and decided afresh by the First-tier Tribunal.
Background
3. The Appellant is a citizen of Nigeria born on 6 August 2000. He came to the UK in 2002, then aged 2, accompanying his mother on a visit visa. In August 2011 the Appellant’s mother applied for leave to remain with the Appellant as her dependant; that application was refused in September 2011. On 14 May 2015 the Appellant’s mother applied for leave to remain on grounds of family/private life. She was granted leave valid until 6 May 2022.
4. The Appellant has four criminal convictions. On 1 October 2019 he was convicted of robbery, for which he was sentenced to 15 months’ detention suspended for two years. On 14 February 2022 he was convicted of possessing an offensive weapon for which he received a sentence of eight weeks’ imprisonment. On 20 October 2023 he was convicted of possessing an offensive weapon in a public place and was sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment. On 19 February 2025 the Appellant was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment for a further offence of possessing an offensive weapon.
5. On 22 December 2023 the Respondent issued a deportation notice informing the Appellant that he was liable to deportation under s32(5) UK Borders Act 2007. On 13 March 2025 the Respondent refused the Appellant’s human rights application and made a deportation order against him.
6. On 2 May 2025 the Appellant was diagnosed with anxiety and depression and was prescribed medication and referred to a mental health practitioner.
7. The Appellant’s appeal was heard by the First-tier Tribunal on 16 May 2025. At the hearing, the Appellant accepted that he could not meet the private life exception to deportation in s117C(4) Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 (‘NIAA 2002’) because he had not been lawfully resident in the UK for most of his life. However, he argued that there were in his case very significant obstacles to his reintegration in Nigeria and that there were very compelling circumstances outweighing the public interest in deportation. The First-tier Tribunal did not accept those arguments and dismissed the appeal on 16 September 2025. The Appellant was granted permission to appeal by the Upper Tribunal on 9 February 2026.
8. The appeal came before me at an error of law hearing on 8 April 2026. Having heard submissions from the parties, I reserved my decision, which is given with reasons below.
Grounds of appeal
9. The grounds on which the Upper Tribunal granted permission to appeal were:
a. Ground 1: The First-tier Tribunal had erred in relation to the issue of whether the Appellant was socially and culturally integrated in the UK, and/or misdirected itself by failing to apply the guidance provided in CI (Nigeria) v SSHD[2019] EWCA Civ 2027;
b. Ground 2: The First-tier Tribunal had erred and made speculative findings unsupported by the evidence in relation to whether there were very significant obstacles to the Appellant’s return;
c. Ground 3: The First-tier Tribunal had erred, and acted unfairly, in rejecting the evidence of the Appellant’s mother as to her experience of domestic violence by the Appellant’s father when that evidence was not challenged during the hearing.
Discussion and decision
Legal framework
10. When a court or tribunal is required to determine whether a decision made under the Immigration Acts breaches a person’s right to respect for his private or family life under Article 8 ECHR, it must apply the provisions of s117A-D Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 (‘NIAA 2002’). When assessing whether an interference with a person’s Article 8 rights is justified under Article 8(2), the court or tribunal must in particular have regard to the considerations in s117B, and in cases concerning deportation of foreign criminals, to the considerations in s117C.
11. Section 117C(3) provides that, where a foreign criminal has not been sentenced to a period of imprisonment of four years or more, the public interest requires his deportation unless either or both of the statutory exceptions in s117C(4) or (5) applies.
12. Exception 1 in s117C(4) applies where (a) the foreign criminal has been lawfully resident in the UK for most of his life, (b) he is socially and culturally integrated in the UK, and (c) there would be very significant obstacles to his integration into the country to which it is proposed to deport him.
13. Exception 2 in s117C(5) applies where the foreign criminal has a genuine and subsisting parental relationship with a qualifying child or partner and the effect of his deportation on the child would be unduly harsh.
14. In cases where neither Exception 1 nor Exception 2 applies, a full proportionality assessment is required, weighing the interference with the Article 8 rights of the foreign criminal and his family against the public interest in deportation. In conducting that assessment, s117C(6) provides that the public interest requires deportation unless there are “very compelling circumstances over and above those described in Exceptions 1 and 2”: HA (Iraq) v SSHD [2022] UKSC 22, [2023] 1 All ER 365 at §47.
15. Although the wording of s117C(6) is directed to offenders who have been sentenced to at least four years’ imprisonment, an offender who has not been sentenced to at least four years’ imprisonment who cannot satisfy Exceptions 1 or 2 may also seek to show that the ‘very compelling circumstances’ test in s117C(6) is met: NA (Pakistan) v SSHD [2016] EWCA Civ 662, approved in HA (Iraq) at §50.
Ground 1: social and cultural integration
16. On behalf of the Appellant, Mr Georget submitted that the First-tier Tribunal judge had erred at §41-42 of the decision by treating the Appellant’s offending as determinative of the question of his social and cultural integration, and that the judge’s approach was contrary to the guidance of the Court of Appeal in CI (Nigeria) v SSHD [2019] EWCA Civ 2027. For the Respondent, Mr Tufan submitted that the judge’s findings were open to him, given the fact of the Appellant’s repeat offending, and were adequately reasoned; CI (Nigeria) should be distinguished on the facts.
17. In CI (Nigeria) the Court of Appeal gave guidance on the approach to be taken to an individual’s criminal offending when assessing whether he is “socially and culturally integrated in the United Kingdom” for the purposes of the statutory exception in s117C(4). The Court held (§61) that whilst criminal offending and time spent in prison were in principle relevant in so far as they indicated that a person lacked legitimate social and cultural ties, it was an error to treat offending or imprisonment as necessarily severing social and cultural ties through its very nature, irrespective of its actual effects on the individual’s relationships and affiliations (§77). The question of social and cultural integration was a fact-sensitive question concerned solely with a person’s social and cultural affiliations and identity (§80).
18. The First-tier Tribunal judge considered the issue at §41-42 of his decision. The judge took into account the time that the Appellant had lived in the UK and the fact that he had come to the UK at the age of four; he accepted that the Appellant had been educated in the UK, had limited ties to Nigeria and identified as British. He then continued, at §42:
“However, the appellant’s offending is consistent with entrenched antisocial and procriminal attitudes that are odds with societal norms….I find that anyone who engages in the sort of repeated offending the appellant has engaged, including people of British heritage, born in the UK, who are UK citizens, are unlikely to be culturally or socially integrated into UK. I am therefore not satisfied the appellant can properly be described as socially and culturally integrated into the UK.[sic]”
19. I accept Mr Georget’s submission that the judge in that passage, and particularly in his observation that anyone who had engaged in “the sort of repeated offending the appellant has engaged [sic]” was unlikely to be integrated into the UK, treated the nature of the Appellant's offending as determinative of the question of his integration. In doing so, the judge fell into the error identified by the Court of Appeal in CI (Nigeria).
20. The judge was of course, as Mr Georget properly accepted, entitled to take into account the Appellant's offending as a factor which potentially pointed away from his being socially and culturally integrated. However, the judge erred by failing to carry out the fact-sensitive assessment required when considering whether the Appellant was integrated as at the time of the hearing. Had the judge done so, on the facts of the Appellant's case it is not possible to say that he would inevitably have concluded that the Appellant was not socially and culturally integrated. The judge’s error was therefore material to his conclusion as to whether the Appellant met s117C(4)(b) NIAA 2002 and hence to his assessment of the proportionality of the Appellant's removal from the UK, the central issue in the appeal.
Ground 2: very significant obstacles to integration in Nigeria
21. Given my conclusion on Ground 1 it is not necessary to determine Grounds 2 or 3 and I therefore address them briefly.
22. The First-tier Tribunal judge considered s117C(4)(c) at §43-37 of the decision. He concluded that the Appellant would not face very significant obstacles to integration in Nigeria because (§44) adult members of his family in the UK would continue to have significant knowledge of Nigeria’s customs and traditions, and because the Appellant's aunt, uncle and other adults who had provided letters of support for the appeal were likely to have subsisting social or business ties in Nigeria. At §45, the judge found that the Appellant's aunt could continue to support the Appellant financially and inferred that other family members who had written letters in support of his appeal were also likely to contribute to financially supporting him in Nigeria. At §46 he inferred that the Appellant’s family and family friends would have social contacts in Nigeria who would provide practical support including accommodation.
23. I accept the submission on behalf of the Appellant that the judge’s reasoning was based on speculative inferences which were not supported by the evidence recorded elsewhere in the decision. For example, the judge recorded that the Appellant's uncle’s evidence was that he had not been back to Nigeria since the age of 16 but had returned recently for the first time in 40 years to achieve ‘closure’ following a life-changing accident he had suffered as a child, and that he would continue to support the Appellant by giving him £50 a month if he were able to. Similarly, the Appellant's aunt’s evidence was recorded that she had not visited Nigeria between 2004 and 2024, when she visited on a business trip, and that she would not be able to continue supporting the Appellant financially at £20-40 per month if he were returned to Nigeria. That evidence, which was not challenged, was not a sufficient basis for the wide-ranging inferences which the judge drew. I find that the judge erred in extrapolating from the evidence and that his findings were not supported by the evidence which was before him. That error was material to his overall conclusion on proportionality.
Ground 3: the Appellant's mother’s evidence
24. The judge recorded the evidence of the Appellant's mother at §3 of the decision as being that she had brought the Appellant to the UK having fled domestic violence by the Appellant's father. There was no challenge to that evidence. However, at §35 the judge rejected a submission that he should proceed on the basis that the mother’s evidence was true, and at §51 the judge stated that “For the reasons already given, I did not accept her claimed vulnerability as a victim of domestic violence”.
25. It is trite that where the evidence of a witness is impugned on any point, the witness must be given the opportunity to answer the point in cross-examination. As the evidence of the Appellant's mother had not been challenged in cross-examination, it was incumbent on the judge to raise his concerns with the parties and give the witness an opportunity to respond. I consider that the judge erred in not doing so. However, I do not consider that the error was material to the outcome of the appeal, because the evidence in question (the circumstances in which the Appellant's mother had come to the UK) was not material to the central issues which the judge was required to determine.
Disposal
26. I conclude that Grounds 1 and 2 identify material errors in the decision of the First-tier Tribunal and that the decision should be set aside.
27. Having regard to paragraph 7 of the Practice Statement and the guidance in AEB [2022] EWCA Civ 1512, I consider that it is appropriate for the appeal to be remitted to the First-tier Tribunal for a de novo hearing before a different judge with no findings preserved.

Notice of Decision
The decision of the First-tier Tribunal involved the making of a material error of law. The decision is set aside and the appeal is remitted to the First-tier Tribunal for a de novo hearing before a different judge with no findings preserved.

L Hirst

Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber

27 May 2026