Vilvarajah v Secretary of State for the Home Department
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judgment Date | 26 October 1987 |
| Date | 26 October 1987 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Civil Division) |
Court of Appeal
Sir John Donaldson MR Neill, Ralph Gibson LJJ
A Riza for the applicants
D Pannick for the respondent
Case referred to in the judgments:
R v Secretary of State for the Home Department ex parte Sivakumaran and ors (CA) [1987] 1 WLR 1047.*
Judicial review bail when an applicant seeking bail should apply to an adjudicator when it is appropriate for an application to be made to the court the approach adopted by the court where the Secretary of State opposes bail. Immigration Act 1971 sch. 2 para. 22; RSC 0.53 r. 14.
The applicants for bail* were Tamils from Sri Lanka who had originally been refused leave to enter but who, on judicial review had secured the quashing of that refusal: they were accordingly detained pending the examination of their claims to be refugees.
The court took the opportunity of setting out the principles that applied to the consideration of applications for bail.
Held:
1. Where a person was detained pending examination an application for bail should normally be made to an adjudicator who had power to grant it under paragraph 22 of the second schedule to the 1971 Act.
2. Where a decision had been made that a person should not be admitted at all to the United Kingdom, an adjudicator had no jurisdiction and application in appropriate cases had to be made to the court.
3. The Secretary of State might not oppose bail: he might welcome the intervention of the court in granting it because the court could require sureties which the Secretary of State could not demand as a condition of temporary admission.
4. If the Secretary of State opposed bail following a refusal of temporary admission the court should only grant bail if the Secretary of State had erred in principle in refusing temporary admission or had acted unreasonably in the Wednesbury sense.
The Master of the Rolls: This court has before it two applications for bail by Tamils, Vaithialingham Skandarajah and Nadarajah Vilvarajah. Before dealing with those applications I would like to try and clear up two fundamental misunderstandings about what it was that this court decided on 12 October 1987.
Reading the newspapers the next day and listening to the radio and television (with, I am bound to say, the notable exception of Law In Action) as far as I could make out either no-one had read the judgmentthis, I am bound to say, included the Secretary of State, who broadcast on the radio at one...
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