OA079202015

For the respondent: Mr Sebastian Kandola (on 20 June); Miss Julie Isherwood (on 24 July)

This is an appeal, by the , against the decision of the First-tier Tribunal (Judge Ian Howard), sitting at Hatton Cross on 17 August 2016, to an appeal against refusal of a wife visa, by a citizen of Morocco, born 1988.

The sponsor, also a citizen of Morocco, had entered into a civil partnership with a Frenchman in this country in 2008, following which he remained in this country on an EEA residence card. In 2013 he and the appellant married in Morocco; but it was not till 2014 that his civil partnership was dissolved. The respondent took the point that he had not been free to marry the appellant when he did.

This was one of the two points on which the judge dismissed the appeal, after finding that the appellant and the sponsor did have a 'genuine and subsisting relationship'. The other involved the lack of the required TB certificate at the date of the decision. Since there is one now, and the decision involved the validity of the parties' marriage, that question needs to be decided, whether or not it could affect the result under the Immigration Rules.

[The applicant maintains] that it is a valid Moroccan marriage as the sponsor's civil partnership, extant at the date of the marriage, would not be recognised in Morocco at all. I have no evidence to support this contention beyond the appellant's assertion in her grounds of appeal.