Jurisdictional guides

This subtopic provides a range of international guidance.

The Lexology Panoramic guides, curated by leading lawyers and law firms, provide a view of laws and regulations in multiple jurisdictions across key topic areas. They are written in a Q&A format. The guides included here

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Latest Immigration News

Changes to ECCTIS services, and higher fee for English proficiency and qualification comparison

The Home Office’s commercial partner for verifying overseas qualifications, ECCTIS, has made some changes to its online services, and raised one of its fees. The previous online Visa and Nationality service has been replaced with a new ‘Qualification and Language Service’ (QLS) which offers two different services: ‘English proficiency and qualification comparison’ and ‘qualification comparison’. The English proficiency and qualification comparison will check whether an overseas qualification is comparable to a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD degree in the UK, and the level of English proficiency, on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), needed to complete the course. Where the institution is in a Home Office-specified majority English speaking country, the comparison will not state an English level. Ecctis will also contact the institution to check that the qualification is genuine. The Qualification comparison applies only to applicants in the Skilled Worker route who are applying under salary points options which require a PhD, and persons applying in the High Potential Individual route. In both these cases, there is no requirement for the course to have been taught in English, as they do not relate to the English language requirement. For both of these services, the cost is now £210, plus £42 VAT (this was previously the fee for PhD checking, while the qualification and English proficiency check previously cost £140 plus VAT). Also, in both cases the anticipated turnaround is 20 working days (rather than 10 for the qualification/English check and 30 for the PhD check). There is no longer any fast track service advertised. A successful applicant will receive a code in the new Ecctis portal, which they should share with the Home Office in their visa application.

Immigration weekly highlights—1 May 2025

Welcome to the 1 May 2025 highlights from the Immigration team, which provides links to key news stories from the last week, as well as a round-up of new and updated content in Immigration.

Amendments will remove Refugee Convention deport protections for sex offenders, and AI announcement

The Home Office has announced that it is adding new amendments to the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, which include provisions to exclude foreign nationals convicted of sex offences from protection under the Refugee Convention, in relation to deportation. Under the proposed amendment, any conviction that would resulting in registration on the sex offenders register would lead to a presumption that the person has been convicted of a ‘particularly serious crime’, which is an exception to the Refugee Convention protection in relation to automatic deportation. Other amendments being laid before the report stage include a new requirement for the First-tier Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber to decide appeals within 24 weeks, aimed at reducing processing times for asylum claims, and stronger powers for the Immigration Advice Authority against non-registered immigration advisers. The same announcement also confirms that the Home Office is to start using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to assist caseworkers in making decisions on asylum claims, by speeding up access to the relevant country advice, and summarising interview transcripts. This is to facilitate quicker decisions on asylum claims ‘without compromising on the quality of human decisions’.

Home Office pilots two AI tools to assist in asylum decision-making process

The Home Office has published an evaluation of small scale-pilots of two artificial intelligence (AI) tools designed to assist in the asylum decision-making process. These were the Asylum Case Summarisation (ACS) tool, which uses AI to generate concise summaries of lengthy interview transcripts, and the Asylum Policy Search (APS) tool, which retrieves and summarises country policy information. Pilots conducted between May and December 2024 indicated that the ACS tool reduced transcript review time by approximately 23 minutes per case, while the APS tool saved about 37 minutes per case. Quality assurance measures using the Home Office’s existing Calibre tool appeared to show that neither tool compromised decision quality. The evaluation states that both tools adhere to the ‘human in the loop’ principle, so that they cannot be used by themselves to make a decision. User feedback was collected through surveys and semi-structured interviews, with some participants noting issues such as the lack of source references and some inaccuracies/missing information in ACS summaries and suggestions for further functionality in the APS tool. Limitations of the tools identified in the evaluation should be addressed before a full rollout, and any further rollout should be continuously monitored in its early stages, and then fully evaluated after deployment.