Immigration has been a contentious and controversial area of public policy in the United Kingdom since the Commonwealth Immigration Act ended most primary immigration in 1962. Community and political groups have campaigned against the restrictive policy of successive governments towards secondary immigration. More recently, Britain’s treatment of asylum-seekers, as part of its obligations as a signatory of the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees, has also attracted a great deal of criticism.

The 1996 Asylum and Immigration Act which withdrew social security benefits from many seeking asylum in the United Kingdom, arguably produced greater moral outrage, among a broad spectrum of liberal opinion, than any other policy pursued by John Major’s Conservative government. As this book goes to press, the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Bill will shortly receive its third reading in parliament, which will establish a system of cashless support for asylum-seekers in ‘designated’ accommodation around the country. Thousands have already demonstrated against Tony Blair’s New Labour government which promised to restore full social security benefits to asylum-seekers, on humanitarian grounds, when it was campaigning for office in 1997.

One institution which has received some media attention during this period is the appeals system that reviews administrative decisions on immigration and asylum made by the British government. This was established for immigration decisions by the 1969 Immigration (Appeals) Act, following the recommendations of the Wilson Report, and has been administered by the Lord Chancellor’s Department since 1987. Asylumseekers were given a right of appeal by the 1993 Asylum and Immigration Act. This appeals system is technically an administrative tribunal – one of over 70 that have been established since the Franks Report of 1957 – but most people working there prefer to use the term ‘court’ which seems appropriate, given the formality of the proceedings, and the importance of the decisions being made for the lives of individual appellants.

My use of the term ‘courts’, rather than ‘tribunals’ in the title of this book should not, however, be taken as endorsing the perspective of practitioners. During my fieldwork, some adjudicators – the current name for the professional group making decisions in the courts – were lobbying to be allowed to use the title ‘Immigration Judge’ to acknowledge the technical character of their work.