Sudanese migrant allowed to remain in UK as she is married to her cousin & being deported would breach her human rights

A MIGRANT has been granted permission to stay in the UK after she married her cousin. The Home Office formerly denied Isra Abdallah Ibrahim asylum in the UK, claiming she had only married her cousin so she could join him in Europe, once his refugee status was granted. But Ibrahim maintained that the marriage was an Islamic custom, overseen in their home country of Sudan years before, in 2011. She claimed it would be a breach of her rights to a family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) if she was forced to leave the UK and her husband. Sign up for The Sun newsletter Thank you! British authorities became suspicious when they struggled to track down any official documentation of the marriage, with Ibrahim claiming it was “local tradition” not to record it. The Home Office initially suspected the marriage was a means of negotiating entry into Europe and that the husband had “never intended to set down roots”. However, Ibrahim’s husband convinced the tribunal he had always planned to stay in Libya and had no intentions of coming to Britain. Ibrahim won her case at the Upper Tribunal in Manchester on August 24, after appealing the decision on the grounds that it violated her rights. At the Tribunal, she said: “In accordance with local tradition, it was asserted that the customary marriage was not recorded in any official documentation.” A couple of years after their marriage, her husband left for Libya without her and worked for two years before marrying her by proxy. Most read in The Sun This was allegedly because Libyan authorities would not have recognised the Sudanese “customary marriage”. After conditions “seriously deteriorated” in Libya, he made the decision to flee for Europe. He received refugee status in the UK in 2015 and Ibrahim later came to join him. The fact that the couple were cousins was initially contentious, with concerns it would violate the “prohibited degree of relationship set out in the applicable rules”. However, they were not found to have breached any laws, as it is technically legal to marry your cousin in Britain. Upper Tribunal Judge Paul Lodato said: “When I stand back and assess the overall evidential picture, [Ibrahim] has established on the balance of probabilities, through the fully tested evidence of her sponsor, that she married her husband in 2014 when he was habitually resident in Libya. He added that when the pair married by proxy in 2014, the husband had been working in Libya for over a year and had made no attempts to leave the country. “I am satisfied that this all weighs in favour of the sponsor having settled in Libya with a degree of continuity over an appreciable and meaningful period of time,” he said. “Having found that the couple were married when the sponsor was in his country of habitual residence, and in accordance with the parties agreement that this was a decisive and dispositive question of fact, the appeal is allowed because [Ibrahim] met the applicable rules which renders the refusal decision demonstrably disproportionate.”