Yvonne left her son at home in the Caribbean when he was very young. Her parents brought him up while she came to England to make her living.
Over the years that followed she did everything she could to maintain contact with him. But she also married a British man from a Jamaican family and they had a child together.
Meanwhile her son back home entered his teenage years. Her parents became old and less capable of parental control.
Yvonne applied on several occasions for her son to join her, but she had been refused because she could not show that she had “sole responsibility” for his upbringing. However, in recent times she, her husband and their child had been able to afford to spend holidays with her son. Contact with the teenage boy was taking place every day by Skype. But the Entry Clearance Officer still turned the application down; the boy’s grandparents had raised him and Yvonne could not prove that their role had ceased.
We brought the case to the Immigration Judge. We argued that it was not just a question of sole responsibility under the Immigration Rules; there was also family life under the European Convention of Human Rights. The relationship established in recent years between the teenager, his mother, her husband and his half-sibling, was strong enough to constitute a family that included her boy. In theory, Yvonne, her husband and their child could all go to Jamaica to maintain family life with the teenage boy; but was it reasonable for her husband to make that move where there were no prospects of employment, or for the child to suffer that disruption ?
The Judge decided that it would be a gross interference, and disproportionate to the needs of Immigration control.
On Human Rights he allowed the Appeal, and the teenager arrived here. He is now in secondary school.
