CA-2025-002338 - [2025] EWCA Civ 1264

There is a short answer to ground 1. This case is not about CTK’s rights under Article 4 of the ECHR, or about ECAT. It concerns the Secretary of State’s duty at common law to comply with her own statutory guidance, the provisions of which she has voluntarily adopted in order, among other things, to ensure that she complies with her obligations to investigate suspicions of trafficking. The Secretary of State was not, at the end of the hearing of this application, in a position to assert that CTK could, himself, enforce the provisions of ECAT against the French authorities in France. Her submission, at most, was that she wants to remove CTK to a State which is bound by ECAT in international law. That is no answer to CTK’s claim that he has a right, conferred on him by domestic law, to request, in the United Kingdom, a reconsideration of the Competent Authority’s negative reasonable grounds decision, and not to be removed from the United Kingdom until that reconsideration has taken place.