Paul Cutler's Migration Case Law Blog
Ministerial Direction 99
I realise the new Ministerial Direction 99 commenced on 3 March 2023 and there have been lots of newsletters about it. The most important changes are that long term residents are going to be treated more leniently. This is one area where character cancellations can be very unfair and it's good to see some reform. The major changes are that: the strength, nature and duration of ties to Australia...
Genuine Consideration
Minister for Immigration, Citizen v McQueen [2022] FCAFC 199 is not the first case that I have blogged about where the underlying issue is whether the Minister, when exercising his personal powers under section 501CA (4) of the Migration Act had failed to give any proper, genuine, or realistic consideration himself to the Applicant’s representations. In the other case, 11 minutes was...
Aggregate sentences
I have previously blogged about Ms Pearson's first Full Court case. Her first attempt to have the decision to cancel her visa on character grounds revoked failed. In a very unusual step, she filed a second application some 7 months later (in October 2022). One of her new arguments was that her visa shouldn't have been cancelled because she hadn't been sentenced to a term of imprisonment of 12...
Valid Application
How hard can it be to make a valid application to the AAT? You might be forgiven for thinking that section 29(1)(c) of the AAT Act which says that an application “must contain a statement of the reasons for the application”, is clear. Despite Mr Miller's application not containing the reasons (which was agreed), a copy was later provided when the AAT requested it. That request came outside the 9...
Fairness and Security
Visa cancellations on national security grounds are rare and they often raise complex issues at the intersection of procedural fairness and secret information. SDCV v Director General of Security [2022] HCA 32 was not an exception. In 2018 (after his citizenship application was approved but before the ceremony), ASIO found that SDCV was a security risk as he had links to terrorism and had used a...