466 • Identifying the Stateless in the United Kingdom 5.3 Inability to vindicate rights due to insufficient legal aid and physical barriers For stateless persons, the availability of legal aid will determine whether they have access to legal representation. With the justification of austerity in the past few years, legal aid in the context of immigration law has been limited to bail and asylum applications. For matters such as statelessness and deportation, legal aid is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain in England and Wales, despite their crucial impact on the legal status of the applicant as much as on the decision to detain.173 At the administrative stage, legal aid to prepare statelessness 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 Interview with Clare Miller, Solicitor (Oxford, 29 April 2016). Singer (n 19) 5; Brad K Blitz and Miguel Otero-Iglesias, ‘Stateless by Any Other Name: Refused AsylumSeekers in the United Kingdom’ (2011) 37 Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 657, 669. The same problems have been discussed in the Canadian context. See Silverman and Molnar (n 64) 122–23. Singer (n 19) 23. Stateless Person 1 (n 117); Stateless Person 6 (n 116); Stateless Person 7 (n 110); Stateless Person 8 (n 110). Close Campsfield Campaign, ‘Still a Travesty. Justice in Immigration Bail Hearings: Second Report from the Bail Observation Project’ (Windrush Press 2013) 46; Bianchini (n 8) 22. Close Campsfield Campaign (n 170) 46. ibid. There is legal aid for statelessness applications in Northern Ireland and Scotland. Interview with Alison Harvey, Director, Immigration Lawyers Practitioners Association (London, 20 March 2016). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ijrl/article/32/3/440/6065591 by guest on 04 July 2025 requirement, especially for destitute individuals with no ties in the UK. While it is possible to apply for basic government accommodation, the process can be particularly time-consuming for migrants with a criminal record, as permission from probation officers and police checks are also required.166 Addressing this problem, Singer argues that the uncertainty characterizing bail decisions and the difficulties that individuals face when asked to support applications for their release make the system unclear and arbitrary.167 She also suggests that distrust of the judicial system is so pervasive that many detainees see it as part of the same apparatus as the HO.168 In line with her findings, participants in the present study felt that many immigration officials deliberately, or through negligence, undermined their immigration cases. Finally, the interviewees emphasized the uselessness of bail hearings as a mechanism to check the length of detention.169 Their statements mirror a former study on immigration detention of irregular migrants according to which ‘[o]bservation of 50 bail hearings where the applicant had been held in detention for three or more months, and for which the observers were able to record this item of information, the judge mentioned length of detention in only ten of them’.170 A larger sample of 220 bail hearings showed some evidence of good practice.171 However, widespread variations in judicial decisions continue to be reported, which is of concern given that the role of immigration judges is to ensure a fair hearing.172 Further research is warranted to explore the role of statelessness in bail hearings and the awareness of the problem among immigration judges. Future studies may find that immigration judges lack sufficient knowledge about the problem of statelessness and find themselves out of their depth when dealing with these cases. In addition, the ineffectiveness of the bail mechanism is exacerbated by insufficient legal aid, as explained below.