Mr Dabo was represented in the Court of Appeal by Sadat Sayeed and Alex Schymyck of the Garden Court Chambers Immigration Team, instructed by Yalda Qabool of Ata & Co.
In Secretary of State for the Home Department v Dabo [2026] EWCA Civ 907, the Court of Appeal has dismissed Secretary of State’s appeal against a determination of the First-tier Tribunal (which had been upheld by the Upper Tribunal) that Mr Dabo’s deportation would breach Article 8 ECHR.
Mr Dabo is from Guinea but has been in the UK since he was a child. He has a number of criminal convictions, which resulted in the making of a deportation order against him.
The First-tier Tribunal found that he had previously suffered persecution but was no longer at risk due to the passage of time. However, it then went on to find that he was socially and culturally integrated into the UK and that there would be very significant obstacles to his integration into life in Guinea. The Secretary of State appealed against both of those findings on the basis that the First-tier Tribunal had incorrectly applied the law.
The First-tier Tribunal had carried out a very close review of the evidence before it and produced a lengthy and closely reasoned determination running to 214 paragraphs over 30 pages. Ultimately, the Court of Appeal decided that the determination demonstrated sufficient awareness and application of the legal tests even though, as Andrews LJ observed, some of the conclusions were “somewhat surprising”.
The Secretary of State’s first ground of appeal was that the First-tier Tribunal should have assessed Mr Dabo’s integration into the UK on a temporal basis i.e. found that Mr Dabo was integrated into the UK but that that integration had been broken by his criminal offending. However, the Court comprehensively rejected that submission having reviewed the relevant authorities:
“I reject any suggestion that this should have been approached on a temporal basis by asking whether the offending interrupted his social and cultural integration at any given time and then considering whether that integration was resumed. It is clear from CI (Nigeria) that the assessment must be holistic. It is wrong to extrapolate from what was said in Binbuga a legal requirement to consider whether someone’s offending has broken the continuity of their integration. There may be cases in which a person’s integration into the UK prior to their offending is so limited that their subsequent criminal history and antisocial behaviour and attitudes can be treated as bringing it to an end, or even expunging it, but that does not mean that the tribunal must adopt some kind of linear chronological approach. Rather, CI Nigeria requires an assessment of the individual’s integration, or lack of it, as at the time of the hearing, when all the offending behaviour and its impact on the offender’s social and cultural ties must be considered as part of that assessment.”
The Secretary of State’s second ground of appeal was that the First-tier Tribunal had, by referring to the classic authority on the meaning of ‘integration’ (Secretary of State for the Home Department v Kamara [2016] EWCA Civ 813; [2016] 4 WLR 152), misdirected itself on the meaning of the “very significant obstacles” test. The Court of Appeal dealt with the second ground of appeal in straightforward terms and found that: “The judge had the ‘very serious obstacles’ test well in mind”.
The judgment is a useful illustration of the importance of getting things right in the First-tier Tribunal. Even though the Court of Appeal had some reservations about the conclusions reached by the judge, it was not willing to interfere with them simply on the basis that the Secretary of State disagreed with them.
To contact or instruct Sadat Sayeed or Alex Schymyck, please email: immigrationclerks@gclaw.co.uk
