A tourist from Ghana was granted the right to live in the UK under Brexit marriage rules despite not attending her own wedding.
Francisca Boateng, 42, is reported to have won her immigration appeal after she claimed her “proxy” marriage to a German man living in Britain had lasted the length of time required to qualify for her to remain in the UK.
Neither Ms Boateng nor Fatao Sualihu were at their wedding in Kumasi, Ghana, in December 2018, after the pair met while she was on holiday in the UK.
Ms Boateng had returned home from her UK trip to Ghana where she divorced her then husband before the “proxy” wedding to Mr Sualihu, according to the Telegraph.
She joined Mr Sualihu in the UK with her two children, but within 15 months the marriage had broken down. The couple’s divorce was concluded in January 2022.
Under the terms of the Brexit deal’s EU settlement scheme, Ms Boateng was within her rights to claim residency in the UK because her marriage had lasted three years from the date of the wedding in Ghana.
Her right to claim residency stemmed from the fact her husband was also eligible for settled status despite there not being a marriage certificate until three weeks after the proxy wedding date, which would have left them under the three-year limit.
The case comes amid fresh criticism of Britain’s immigration tribunal system and reports of migrants gaining the right to remain or to avoid deportation in contentious circumstances.
One such case involves an Albanian criminal whose deportation was halted partly because of his young son’s aversion to foreign chicken nuggets.
Another case saw a Palestinian family granted the right to remain in the UK after they applied through a scheme designed for Ukrainian refugees.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said this week he wanted to close a “loophole” that allowed the family to remain in the UK.
The PM told the Commons the decision was “wrong”, Parliament should make the rules on immigration and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has got her team working on closing a “loophole”.
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch raised the case at Prime Minister’s Questions as she urged Sir Keir to appeal the decision and bring forward legislation to “clarify the right to a family life” in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
The family-of-six was displaced when their home in the Gaza Strip was destroyed by an air strike in the Israel-Hamas war.
They applied for entry to the UK using the Ukraine Family Scheme to join the father’s brother, who has lived in the UK since 2007 and is a British citizen.
This was refused in May last year after the Home Office concluded the requirements of the scheme had not been met.
The family, which has been granted anonymity, had an appeal against the decision dismissed by a first-tier immigration tribunal judge in September.
A further appeal has been allowed by upper tribunal judges on the grounds of Article 8 of the ECHR after a hearing in January.
