CA-2024-001383-B - [2025] EWCA Civ 1065

The information about SA’s mental health at the time of the FtT decision in the revocation proceedings is recorded in that decision, which was promulgated on 1 September 2023. The FtT panel made reference to the order of the Court of Protection, which was made only in respect of SA’s capacity to look after her own financial affairs and to conduct litigation. That order has now been in place for just over seven years. The tribunal observed that “capacity is of course multi-faceted, and the medical evidence raises concerns as to whether the loss of capacity also extends to other areas of decision making. Nothing in this decision should be read as a suggestion that we have sought to look behind this.” At the hearing of ANL’s application the court inquired whether the order had ever been expanded to cover any other areas; following the hearing SA’s legal representatives made some inquiries and informed us that it has not.

The FtT decision indicates that on the evidence before it, SA’s mental health deteriorated after the historic legal proceedings came to an end, and that she had suffered a particularly significant and serious deterioration in around April 2017. At some point between then and December 2017 SA was diagnosed with a schizo-affective disorder, a lifelong condition for which there is no cure, although it can be managed with appropriate treatment. She was admitted to hospital voluntarily for treatment in May 2017, but then formally detained under the Mental Health Act from 22 November 2017 until 1 August 2019. That is a very long period for someone to be detained, and the length of compulsory detention is indicative of how unwell SA must have been at the time. Her Deputy was appointed during that period of detention, on 8 June 2018.

The FtT referred to a report from a registered chartered Consultant Clinical Psychologist dated 22 March 2021 which was prepared in order to address the question of SA’s ongoing capacity to litigate, and also to two reports from a Consultant Neurologist dated 4 May 2022 and 10 February 2023. The Consultant Psychologist assessed SA throughout the period from December 2019 to March 2021. He had the benefit of reports from her case manager, social worker and Deputy, as well as attendance notes of meetings with the Deputy. The FtT was satisfied that his opinions were “extremely well sourced” and placed “considerable weight” on his conclusions.

The Consultant Neurologist was of the view that SA’s condition in 2022 was “significantly worse” than when she had last been assessed by the Consultant Psychologist. He considered that by then she lacked capacity in every aspect of her living process, and that what he described as her “florid symptoms” were no longer under control, although he speculated that this was possibly because she had ceased taking her medication. At that point she was delusional and hearing voices in her head encouraging her to kill people and to harm herself and her daughter, and other voices telling her that if she did so she would go to Hell.

In his skeleton argument Mr Gajjar quoted from the Consultant Neurologist’s report of 4 May 2022. Salient extracts include the following:

“The last three days however before seeing her she said she was very ill and that she could not sleep, and she was worried about her general medical condition as a result of ongoing matters in the immigration proceedings and in particular the application by the Daily Mail which was making her anxious and paranoid to the point where she cannot leave the house….

…. She told me that the immigration status was still a problem for her, and most recently the application being made by the Daily Mail is of grave concern, causing her mental health to deteriorate again.

I can see that the application and potential involvement by the Daily Mail in the ongoing immigration litigation has had a significant effect on [SA’s] mental state and there is a significant vulnerability that it could cause a severe deterioration in her mental health.

Ultimately without knowing the basis of any national newspaper intervention and the precise documents, all I am able to do is reflect on the commentary of [SA] and those who have been working with her as best they can.”

It is unclear what application SA was referring to. There is no evidence before us that the Daily Mail or any other newspaper was involved in the application made by a private individual in 2022 to lift the 2008 anonymity order, to which I referred in paragraph 4 above, which of course predated the revocation appeal proceedings. However, the journalist from the Daily Mail who provided a witness statement in support of ANL’s application has attended hearings in both sets of immigration proceedings to date, and one possibility is that SA associated him with the application that was eventually refused by Judge Clements. The SSHD has also drawn our attention to the mention in an appendix to the FtT’s decision of 1 September 2023 of an application made by the Daily Mail later in 2022 to review documents submitted as evidence in the revocation appeal proceedings. It is possible that SA became aware of that application in advance. A further possibility is that SA was under the delusional belief that the Daily Mail had applied to lift the anonymity orders that had been in place in the asylum appeal proceedings since 2008.

The Consultant Neurologist’s supplemental report in February 2023 (around a month before the FtT heard the appeal against the revocation order) suggested there had been “material improvement” as a result of the resumption of medication. He did not elaborate on how the improvement manifested itself, but since there was no further mention of the delusions which he had singled out for mention in his first report, it is reasonable to infer that this aspect of the illness was now being kept under control by medication. The Neurologist was of the opinion that SA’s chronic health difficulties were not the result of any neurological condition but purely psychiatric.