Project Outline
1) Immigration judges frequently ignore, misuse or misrepresent medical evidence submitted in relation to asylum claims. The Home Office uses the resulting decisions to justify the indeterminate administrative detention of asylum seekers whose cases are then deemed to have failed.

2) The work of Medical Justice frequently requires doctors and medical practitioners to produce medico-legal reports, statements and oral evidence relating to a history of torture, or medical or psychiatric fitness/unfitness for removal. If this information is misjudged, their work is potentially wasted. At best, the asylum seekers, their lawyers, the public purse and the medical practitioners involved must then be put to substantial effort and expense to rectify matters. At worst, such people suffer increasing harm through continuing detention or refoulement and put at risk of further harm.

This project will collate cases of abuse of medical evidence in immigration cases which are or can be in the public domain.

The following examples below are categories of misuse of medical evidence which are currently known to Medical Justice. This list is non-exclusive and can be expanded as further  patterns of misuse emerge:

• Failure of the IJ to mention medico-legal report at all
• Refusal to give weight to medical reports by general practitioners on the sole cited grounds that these examinations were conducted by general practitioners.
• Assumption by the IJ that injuries described by an appellant are incompatible with survival and consequent impugning of appellant's credibility, when medical evidence shows that survival under these circumstances was perfectly feasible.
• Misapplication of case-law to devalue medical evidence.
• Refusal to value medical evidence on the grounds that further examination procedures could have been performed although these were contra-indicated due to the potential harm/re-traumatisation caused by these.  
• Medical evidence devalued for procedural reasons
• Recurrent use of identical statement by an IJ to discredit witness statements of appellants about rape, in contradiction to expert evidence, which was improperly considered.

Call for evidence
This project will be carried out over a period of 3-5 months. In order to assess thoroughly the dynamics and extent of the problem of the misuse of medical evidence in the AIT it will primarily be necessary to assemble a sample of 25-30 cases. If you are aware of any cases/determinations in which Immigration Judges have misused/negated medical evidence and you would like to recommend these for this research project please contact:

Henry Wood at  This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it     
Mobile : 07817253056                        

The research will be undertaken from determinations available and the names of the appellant, the medical practitioner(s) involved and his/her litigants will be kept anonymous.