AC-2025-LON-003558 - [2025] EWHC 2688 (Admin)

In this case a claim for judicial review with urgent consideration of the question of interim relief was first notified to the Court at 16:28 on Wednesday 15 October 2025. The claim bundle was filed at 17:13. The bundle ran to 599 pages. The Form N463 recorded that it had first been appreciated that an urgent application might be necessary at 14:00 on 15 October 2025. By Form N463, this is what the Court was being asked to do. To deal with the application for interim relief within one hour, and in doing so to make an order for an interim injunction on the papers to restrain the removal of the Claimant to France. This proposed removal was pursuant to the UK-France Agreement. The legal background is identified in the recent case of R (CTK) v SSHD [2025] EWCA Civ 1264, where the Court of Appeal upheld a decision granting an urgent injunction.

The SSHD had declared the Claimant’s asylum claim to be inadmissible, pursuant to s.80B of the Nationality Immigration and Asylum Act 2002. The SSHD had also certified as clearly unfounded the Claimant’s human rights claims, pursuant to Sch 3 Part 2 §5 to the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants etc) Act 2004. The date of those decisions was Tuesday 7 October 2025. Removal directions – for a removal to France on Thursday 16 October 2025 – had then been served on the Claimant and his previous representatives on Wednesday 8 October 2025. The Claimant had instructed his current solicitors on Friday 10 October 2025.

This case was one of two urgent cases which were allocated to me, with access to the case papers, at 18:31 on Wednesday 15 October 2025. The other case was R (CES) v SSHD, in which my judgment is [2025] EWHC 2687 (Admin). I dealt with the papers in parallel as well as in sequence. With the assistance of the lawyers in the Administrative Court Office, and a clerk who stepped in at extremely short notice, I was able to get some further information. In particular, we were told that the scheduled flight to France was due to take off at 07:45 on Thursday 16 October 2025. On looking at the papers, I decided that I was very likely to want to convene an urgent oral hearing by MS Teams later in the evening. The SSHD had instructed Counsel (Ms Anderson). She and the Claimant’s Counsel (Mr Lee) were put on standby. I set about reading some key documents. I wanted to try to identify the nature and thrust of the legal challenge, and the case for interim relief, in both the present case and the other urgent case. What I read fortified my provisional view that the oral hearing was appropriate.