[From a LinkedIn post]
A blistering judgment of the Information Tribunal upholding an FOI appeal by Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID) against the decision by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to uphold the Home Office’s refusal to disclose info about the process for deportation to Eritrea and Somalia (and by extension, the likelihood of deportees being either detained, or bailed, pending removal).
The request, about how many Emergency Travel Documents were requested, how many issued, how many people were then removed and how long this took, was refused by the HO on grounds that disclosure would be likely to harm international relations and would prejudice the operation of immigration controls.
The HO failed to reply to the ICO’s enquiries until served with a formal Information Notice. But the ICO then agreed that the exemptions were engaged.
The Tribunal did not agree.
The judgment notes the HO “made no effort to engage” with the appeals, and its evidence consisted of “thinly reasoned assertions, with no evidential support”, and
…we hope that the reasons were not meant to be comprehensive. It would betray a rather dim view by the Home Office of other countries’ governments to think that “many if not most” only care about money, and whether their citizens commit crimes or migrate unlawfully – as humans from all countries do.
To the extent the FOIA exemptions were engaged, the public interest test fell heavily in favour of disclosure. In the face of evidence from BID about levels of unlawful detention (in the form of the number of cases in which it had successfully appealed refusals of bail for detainees) the Tribunal observed that
For hundreds of years, the common law has demanded that administrative detention must be justified and be capable of proper challenge…The work done by BID, both on behalf of individuals and more broadly, supports that public interest. Disclosure…would help it to achieve those ends and avoid injustice.
There were minimal factors in favour of disclosure. In fact “it is difficult to conceive of a case concerning this exemption where the scales could be less weighted in favour of exemption”.
And, in closing, the Tribunal had a blast at the ICO, noting
our surprise that [he] thought it appropriate to accept the [HO’s] bare assertions, given the way in which it had responded to the previous requests described above and the compulsion required before it then properly engaged with these. In turn the…Decision Notices disclose no consideration of the various public interest factors carefully put forward by BID. A pattern of conduct has been established on the part of the [HO] that is within neither the spirit nor the letter of FOIA, and which can now be seen as having resulted in considerable delay together with expense of resources both on the part of the Tribunal and BID…We hope that future decisions will be reached after considerably more care and scrutiny.
Let’s see.
The views in this post (and indeed most posts on this blog) are my personal ones, and do not represent the views of any organisation I am involved with.
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