Immigration Solicitors

Duncan Lewis Solicitors has been nominated as part of a legal collective for PILnet’s 2016 European Award for Exemplary Partnership in the Public Interest, specifically for its work on reuniting unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors across Europe with their family members in the UK under the EU Dublin Regulation.

In June and July of this year, Immigration lawyers at Duncan Lewis worked on a pro-bono basis gathering information about the UK families of minors who were stranded in the Calais ‘Jungle’ building cases to support their applications to come to the UK under EU law and join their relatives. Duncan Lewis has continued to work with them, travelling to the ‘jungle’ to take their statements and support them through the application process.

More recently, lawyers at Duncan Lewis have been working hard to bring unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors in the Jungle to the UK under the ‘Dubs Amendment’. This amendment to the Immigration Act 2016, passed in May 2016, states the UK Government must bring a (as yet unspecified) number of unaccompanied refugee children to the UK from other countries in Europe, even if they do not have family here.

In October, lawyers from the Immigration and Public Law Teams at Duncan Lewis went to the Jungle for several days in order to identify children who are eligible to come to the UK under the Dubs Amendment. Working in difficult conditions in the tense days before the Jungle’s chaotic demolition, they took on the cases of over 40 unaccompanied children, some of whom have now happily been brought to the UK. Duncan Lewis lawyers are striving to bring the remaining children to the UK, and are providing guidance and support to them while they wait in accommodation centres across France, unsure as to what the future holds for them.