Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER
Case No: UI-2026-001138
UI-2026-001136
UI-2026-000768
UI-2026-000769
First-tier Tribunal No: HU/61397/2024
HU/61398/2024

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:

10th June 2026

Before

Deputy upper tribunal JUDGE Kelly

Between

(1) MD ALAUDDIN
(2) AFIA KHATUN
(ANONYMITY NOT ORDERED)
Appellants
and

THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:
For the Appellant: Mr S Karin, Counsel instructed by Imran & Co Solicitors
For the Respondent: Mr E Terrell, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer.

Heard at Field House on the 19th May 2026

DECISION AND REASONS

Introduction
1. The Appellants are respectively husband and wife and are both citizens of Bangladesh. The Respondent refused their human rights claims on the 22nd August 2024 and their appeals against that refusal were dismissed by First-tier Tribunal Revill on the 14th November 2025. On the 18th February 2026, Judge Dainty granted permission to appeal against Judge Revill’s decision on the single ground summarised at paragraph 10(2), below. On the 30th March 2026, following a renewed application, Upper Tribunal Judge Hirst granted permission to appeal on the remaining grounds. Hence the matter came before me.
The appellant’s case
2. The essence of the appellants’ claims before the First-tier Tribunal was that since entering the United Kingdom as visitors on the 24th September 2023, they have resided with one of their seven adult children and have experienced a deterioration in their respective medical conditions. Their removal from the United Kingdom would accordingly be (a) inhumane and contrary to Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, (b) a disproportionate interference with their right to respect for private and family life under Article 8 of the Convention.
Decision of the First-tier Tribunal
3. The findings of Judge Revill, insofar as relevant to the grounds of appeal, can be conveniently summarised as follows.
4. The medical evidence established that the first appellant has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, “mobility issues”, anxiety, and depression. He was thus “a seriously ill person” [26]. He had not however proved that adequate treatment for those conditions would be either unavailable or inaccessible to him in Bangladesh [27 – 32]. The evidence did not in any event establish that the acknowledged deterioration in his health would be so serious, rapid and irreversible as to result in either intense suffering or a substantial reduction in his life expectancy [34]. His appeal under Article 3 accordingly failed.
5. Whilst the medical evidence established that the second appellant has been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, back pain, anaemia, hypertension, bronchial asthma, recurrent respiratory tract infections, and depression, these conditions did not mean that she was “a seriously ill person” [36]. Her appeal under Article 3 accordingly also failed.
6. Given that the appellants had (at the date of hearing) resided in the United Kingdom for over two years, the appellants had established a private life here [38]. However, their circumstances would not pose ‘very significant obstacles’ to their reintegration on return to Bangladesh [44 – 51].
7. Given the practical, financial and emotional support which they received from two of their sons, Mohibul and Rezaul, the appellants had established ‘family life’ in the United Kingdom [40, 41] with which their removal to Bangladesh would interfere [43]. However, the following factors weighed in favour of the public interest in removal. (1) The appellants did not meet the eligibility requirement under the Immigration Rules in that they had not proved that their long-term care needs - needs which the judge accepted existed in the case of the first appellant [57] – would be unable to be met by non-family (professional) carers in Bangladesh [58 – 64]. (2) The appellants had not evidenced an ability to speak English. (3) The appellants had been and would continue to be a charge upon the UK health system if permitted to remain [68, 69].
8. On the other side of the scales, less weight than otherwise attached to the appellants’ family life because (a) the primary family relationships are between adult parents and minor children [71], (b) it was established at a time when they had only limited leave to remain as visitors [72], (c) it was reasonably open to three of the appellant’s children to return to Bangladesh in order to support them in that country [73, 74].
9. Considering matters in the round, removal to Bangladesh was proportionate in furtherance of the strong public interest in maintaining immigration controls [77].
The grounds of appeal.
10. The grounds may conveniently be summarised as follows –
(1) The judge failed to provide, “adequate if any”, reasons under Article 8 for finding that the appellants would not face very significant obstacles to their reintegration on return to Bangladesh given their accepted medical conditions. (Mr Karin did however clarify that he was not pursuing this argument in relation to the judge’s conclusions under Article 3).
(2) The judge was wrong to take account of (a) the appellant’s inability to speak English given that the appellants were (for different reasons) exempt from the English language requirement under paragraph E-ECPT.4.2 of Appendix FM of the Immigration Rules, and (b) the appellant being a charge upon the United Kingdom health system given that they had paid the Immigration Health Surcharge.
(3) The judge was wrong to attach reduced weight to the appellants’ family life with their adult children given that family life was established when the children were still minors and was subsequently “reignited” when the appellants came to the United Kingdom [16].
(4) The judge failed “to consider and make a finding” concerning the impact of the appellants’ removal upon their family members in the United Kingdom [17].
Analysis
11. I take the grounds in turn.
12. Mr Karin submitted that having treated the appellants as credible witnesses and accepting that the first appellant was “seriously ill”, the judge failed to consider how their medical conditions might impact upon their daily lives and consequent ability to integrate on return to Bangladesh. At paragraph 48, the judge accepted that, “the Appellant’s have mobility problems and that this may make it harder to access the community and integrate” but nevertheless considered that this could be mitigated by hiring paid carers and “through visits by their adult children” [49]. Mr Karin submitted, however, that integration was concerned with the building of meaningful personal relationships rather than interacting with professional carers. This is undoubtedly true. However, it seems to me that the assessment of “very significant obstacles” to integration is a comparative exercise whereby a judge is concerned with those obstacles to integration that would be more difficult to surmount in the country of return than in the host country. Given the finding that the appellants were familiar with the language and customs of Bangladesh (and conversely unfamiliar with those of the United Kingdom) it seems to me that the judge was bound to conclude that the obstacles to societal integration that were posed by the appellants’ medical problems would more easily be surmounted on return to Bangladesh than by them remaining in the United Kingdom. Indeed, subject to what appears below, any other conclusion would have been perverse.
13. Mr Karin also argued that the judge failed to take account of what he termed ‘societal attitudes to mental illness’ as a potential obstacle to the appellants’ integration on return Bangladesh. Mr Terrell responded to this by pointing to paragraph 48 of the decision in which he submitted the judge had dealt with all the barriers to integration that they had been invited to consider. In reply, Mr Karin referred to a single - and in my judgement no more than passing - reference in a 17-page Skeleton Argument to “widespread stigma around the subject of mental disorder” as one of three reasons why the cited source concluded that many affected adults did not seek medical attention. The reference to “stigma” was thus made within the context of access to medical treatment (a matter that the judge had considered at paragraph 48) rather than by way of a significant obstacle to wider societal integration. Moreover, Mr Karim did not suggest that this was an issue that had featured in the 65-page expert report prepared by Md Lolaiman (Tusher) upon express instruction to consider (amongst other things) whether there were cultural reasons standing in the way of the appellants receiving professional care in Bangladesh and whether it was safe “for a lone couple to live alone in Bangladesh without their children”. I am not therefore satisfied that societal attitudes to mental illness was raised as a discrete issue by the representative (not Mr Karin) who appeared at the hearing in the First-tier Tribunal. I therefore do not uphold the first ground of appeal.
14. There are two parts to the second ground of appeal, which I take in turn.
15. The grounds of appeal correctly identify those sections of the Immigration Rules that provide exemptions where there is an English language requirement. They also correctly assert that the appellants would (for different reasons) potentially fall within those exemptions. This of course presupposes that the relevant Immigration Rule contains an English language requirement in the first place. It is not however a requirement of the Adult Dependent Relative (ADR) rule that those who need to come to the United Kingdom for assistance in meeting their daily care needs due to the practical absence of such assistance in their country of origin, should also have a facility in the English language. Nevertheless, whether it is because the particular immigration rule does not require it or because the circumstances of the applicant exempts them, the point remains the same: it is only where the applicant meets all the requirements of the rule in question that the Secretary of State has decided, as a matter of policy, that the public interest will not require the applicant to hold an English language qualification. In all other cases, section 117B of the 2002 Act requires a court or tribunal to treat a facility in the English language as being in the public interest. It was not therefore an error of law for the judge to apply this statutory provision. On the contrary, it would have been an error of law for them not to have done so. Any other approach would allow applicants to ‘cherry pick’ those parts of the Immigration Rules that assist their cause whilst ignoring those that undermine it.
16. The finding that gives rise to the second limb of the second ground of appeal is to be found in paragraph 69 of the First-tier Tribunal’s decision -
I find that if remaining in the UK the Appellants would continue to use the NHS, as they have done thus far despite only having leave as visitors, and that this weighs against them in the proportionality assessment.
[Emphasis added]
The core of Mr Karin’s submission was that in making the observation that I have emphasised in the above quotation, the judge failed to appreciate that the appellants had paid the Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS) which would, at the very least, have reduced the extent to which their treatment was a charge on public funds. In reply, Mr Terrell invited me to speculate as to the extent to which the IHS would truly have reflected the actual cost of the treatment that the appellants had received. As I indicated at the hearing, I decline that invitation. It was thus probably unwise of the judge to appear to criticise the appellants for having taken advantage of the availability of medical treatment in the past. It was nevertheless entirely legitimate for them to consider the prospective charge to public funds of meeting the cost of the appellants’ medical treatment should they be granted settled status in the United Kingdom on humanitarian grounds. Indeed, this is doubtless one of the reasons why the Secretary of State has chosen to set such a high bar for those seeking entry clearance to the United Kingdom as an ‘adult dependent relative’. Moreover, the legitimacy of taking this into account in the proportionality assessment is supported by the decision of Akhalu (health claim: ECHR Article 8) [2013] UKUT 400 to which the judge referred at paragraph 68 of their decision.
17. The third ground is founded upon the following passage taken from the First-tier Tribunal’s decision -
I have found the Appellants enjoys family life with their sons Mohibul and Rezaul. Section 117B contains no presumption as to the weight attaching to family life. However, in Arshad v SSHD [2025] EWCA Civ 355, Elisabeth Laing LJ stated at [119] that ‘the core of family life’ is ‘parents who live together with their young children’ (which I take to mean minor children) and that this family life is ‘self-evidently, entitled to greater weight in any proportionality balance than more distant relationships, such as the relationships between adult siblings who have spent periods of their adult lives in separate households, and the relationships between a resident uncle and young children who have both parents living at home’. Although neither of those examples fits the Appellants exactly, I find that the same principle applies; Mohibul and Rezaul grew up with the Appellants, but spent years of their adult lives living in a different country and the present living situation has only arisen in the past two years.
It is of note that the judge relied upon dicta by Elisabeth Laing LJ in Arshad as the basis for attaching reduced weight to the family relationship between the appellants and their adult sons. Indeed, there are similar observations in IA & others v Secretary of State for the Home Office [2025] EWCA Civ 1516 (in which the constitution of the court also included Elisabeth Laing LJ) albeit that those observations appear within the context of whether relationships between parents and their adult children are capable of constituting family life at all. Mr Karin sought to distinguish the examples given in Arshad on the basis that in the present case the appellants and their children had previously lived together with their sons when they were minors and that family life had been (to use the term employed in the grounds) “re-ignited” following an admittedly significant gap in cohabitation. However, the judge specifically acknowledged that neither example cited in Arshad “fits the Appellants exactly”. Moreover, he was surely right to say that the relationship of between a parent and a minor child was (again to quote Elisabeth Laing LJ) “self-evidently entitled to greater weight in any proportionality balance than more distant relationships” of which those cited as falling within the latter category were mere examples. I do not therefore uphold the third ground.
18. Turning to the fourth and final ground (concerning the impact of the appellants’ removal upon other family members residing in the United Kingdom) Mr Karin’s complaint concerned the following passage at paragraph 74 of the First-tier Tribunal’s decision –
However, I consider that the situation of the Appellants’ three other children is analogous to that of the sponsor in Ribeli because there is no reason they cannot return to Bangladesh to support the Appellants emotionally, and either care for them or supervise the professional care arrangements put in place. Rezaul has limited leave as a skilled worker until 2029, earns a good salary, and has clearly worked hard to be in his current position. It is entirely understandable that he wishes to remain in the UK to pursue his career. However, it remains a matter of his choice and it is open to him to move back to Bangladesh.
Mr Karin suggested that the judge’s reasoning was irrational because the appellants did not have any control over whether the three sons who were without settled status in the United Kingdom should decide to return with them to Bangladesh. However, as is made clear in the final sentence, the judge was not looking at this issue from the point of view of the appellants. Rather, the judge was doing precisely that which the fourth ground complains they failed to do; namely, considering the impact of the appellants’ removal upon other family members currently residing in the United Kingdom. In so doing, the judge was merely pointing out that the question of whether the appellants’ removal would result in separation from those of their adult children who did not have settled status in the United Kingdom lay entirely in their (the children’s) own hands. I do not therefore uphold the fourth ground.
Notice of Decision
The appeal is dismissed.

David Kelly Date: 23rd May 2026
Deputy Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber