OA603892009

For the Appellant: Miss N Braganza, Counsel, instructed by Stevens Machi Solicitors

This an appeal by a young man to whom I shall refer to as P against a decision of the Entry Clearance Officer in Bangkok. A very brief history is that his mother arrived in this country in 2002 and she has been here ever since. She has another child in this country and that child is a British citizen.

The Entry Clearance Officer was presented in 2009 with an application by P to join his mother and his brother in the United Kingdom. The application was expressed to be outside the Immigration Rules and on the basis of his Article 8 rights. The application was refused. There was a request for reconsideration. The matter was reviewed by an Entry Clearance Manager. The refusal was maintained. On 21 st October 2010 the First-tier Tribunal, Judge Sweet, promulgated the determination in his appeal against that refusal and dismissed the appeal.

�In any event there is no cogent reason why the sponsor [P�s mother], and her other son [the boy who has British citizenship] cannot live in Vietnam to continue her life in that country.�

That sentence on its own deals a fatal blow to the determination. It cannot be right that a British citizen should have to go and live in Vietnam. In any event that British citizen has a father in this country and to make an order which would in effect involve that boy going to live in Vietnam would interfere very substantially with the Article 8 rights of the father. The connotations are endless. The finding of the judge is simply unsupportable.