When do I have a right to appeal?

This page gives a brief explanation of when you may have the right to appeal against our decision to refuse your application for asylum. We call these reasons 'grounds for appeal'.

Usually, you can appeal on any one or more of the grounds available to you.

You may always appeal on the grounds of:

• race discrimination; or
• human rights, if the decision is against your rights under the European Convention on Human Rights or it would be against your rights for us to remove you from the United Kingdom because of that decision).

If we have told you that we intend to remove you from the United Kingdom, you may also appeal if your removal would be against our obligations under the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.

You may also be able to appeal if:

• our decision was not in line with the immigration rules;
• our decision was not in line with the law; or
• if the immigration rules allowed the person who made the decision to exercise his/her own judgement on the circumstances of your case and his/her judgement should have been exercised differently.

Asylum upgrade appeals

If we refuse your application for asylum, but allow you to stay for humanitarian or other reasons, you may be able to appeal against our decision to refuse you asylum. We call this type of appeal an 'asylum upgrade appeal'.

You may only appeal in this way if we have given you permission to stay in the United Kingdom for more than a year. If you do not have a total of 12 months' permission to stay, you have no right of appeal at all. If you want to stay longer, you must apply for an extension of your permission to stay (we call this 'leave to remain') before your current permission expires.

Non-suspensive appeals

In some cases, you will not have the right to make an appeal while you are still in the United Kingdom. We will remove you from the country and you will have to pursue any appeal from outside the United Kingdom. We will only do this if we can show that you clearly had no grounds for claiming asylum (we call this a 'clearly unfounded claim') and if you came from certain countries.

We call this type of appeal a 'non-suspensive appeal' and the countries concerned are known as 'designated countries for non-suspensive appeals'. You can read detailed, technical information about this in Policy and Law.