2014
COURT OF APPEAL (CRIMINAL DIVISION)
United Kingdom
CORAM
AI Generated Summary
The applicant, a Cuban national with a controversial past, was denied a visa to attend meetings arranged by UK MPs. After failed judicial review attempts, he sought interim relief from the Court of Appeal, which was also denied due to procedural issues and the need for proper consideration. The court directed the respondent to submit further information within two weeks.
J U D G M E N T
LORD JUSTICE PATTEN: I will ask Underhill LJ to give the first judgment.
LORD JUSTICE UNDERHILL: The application which is before us has come on very short notice. One consequence of this is that there has been no appearance from the respondent, the Home Secretary. The Treasury Solicitor was notified of this application earlier today but has not been able at such short notice to obtain counsel to appear. Another consequence is that we have had only a short time to consider the papers before the hearing; and this judgment will itself be correspondingly short and confined to essentials.
The background can be sufficiently summarised as follows.
The applicant is a Cuban citizen who in, I think, the year 2000 was sentenced by a court in Miami to 15 years' imprisonment. There is a strong body of opinion that his conviction, and that of four other defendants convicted at the same time, was a miscarriage of justice; and the case of the "Miami 5" is of some notoriety and has been the subject of a report by Amnesty International. The applicant is so far the only one of the Miami 5 to have been released.
The applicant was on 7 July of this year invited by a group of Members of Parliament interested in his case, and those of the co-defendants, to come to London next week to attend a series of meetings on that subject. I should say that the meetings are not, strictly speaking, meetings of any organ of Parliament itself; but they have, as I have said, been arranged by a group of MPs and it is proposed that they will take place in the Palace of Westminster.
In order to comply with that invitation the applicant applied to the entry clearance officer in Havana for leave to enter. His application was made on 14 August. On 27 August the entry clearance officer refused leave. He made his decision primarily on the basis of paragraph 320(2)(b) of the Immigration Rules, which states that entry clearance should be refused in the case of a person who has been convicted of an offence for which he has been sentenced to a period of imprisonment of at least 4 years. There appears, however, notwithstanding that paragraph, although it is not necessary to give the details at this stage, to be provision in the rules for entry clearance to be granted exceptionally. The officer purported to give consideration to that aspect, but he found that the circumstances relied on by the applicant did not constitute a sufficient reason for departing from the principal rule.
The a