AO (Ghana) v Secretary of State for the Home Department

This is a renewed application for permission to appeal against the refusal of the Upper Tribunal’s permission to appeal from the Upper Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber’s decision on 4 March 2014, dismissing appeal against the Secretary of State’s refusal to award him a two-year post-study visa, a tier 1 all study work migrant visa.

That refusal was on 21 September 2012. The applicant, a citizen of Ghana, who had entered the UK with leave as a Tier 4 student on 13 April 2010, appealed against that decision. The first tier tribunal dismissed the appeal, as did the Upper Tribunal respectively on 19 December 2012 and 4 March 2014. The Upper Tribunal applied the decisions in Nasim [2013] UKUT 610 and Raju [2013] EWCA Civ 755. The problem was the familiar problem, which has been the subject of many applications and appeals to this court, that, at the time that the applicant applied for his Tier 1 post-study visa, while he had completed his course of study, and MBA at the City Banking College, under the auspices of the University of Roehampton, he had not been awarded his certificate by the awarding university. He completed the course on 23 February 2012, a letter from the City Banking College dated 4 April stated that he had completed the programme and that the results “will be confirmed” and “therefore he will be awarded a certificate.”

He applied for his visa on 5 July. The certificate was awarded on 24 July, a month before his tier 4 leave expired, but the Secretary of State refused his application because he had not furnished a certificate before his application, and the letter from City Banking College did not state that he had been awarded the qualification.

The grounds of appeal are that the letter, in substance said this, and that in the light of cases in particular Katel(?) [2013] UKUT and Abdi [1996] Immigration Appeal Reports 148, notwithstanding the requirement in the rules that the application be made after a certificate had been granted, he should have been treated as though it was.

No-one is present today. There has been no application for an adjournment. Nor has there been any indication received by the Court of Appeal office to my knowledge, of a withdrawal of this application. But, in the light of the decision of this court in Hussain [2015] EWCA Civ 2007, handed down on 13 March 2015, the grounds of appeal against the Upper Tribunal’s decision are, in my judgment, utterly unarguable. In Hussain, the court considered a statement from the teaching institution that “the certificate will be issued” and that the applicant was expected to receive the certificate shortly because he had fulfilled all requirements, as insufficient: see paragraphs 31 and following, especially paragraphs 36 to 39. The court held that no date had been given for the award. It is clear from the guidance in the rules is that there should be a post-award application, save in the very specific circumstances set out there.

None of those circumstances apply in this case. Therefore the tribunal was entitled to conclude that, at the time of making the application, this applicant had completed his course, but not yet received his qualification. In Raju’scase, this court held that that state of affairs was insufficient to merit the award of the necessary points for Tier 1 post-study visa. That was reiterated in broader terms in Hussain’s case, to which I have referred. Accordingly, this application is dismissed.