Nosiba Abdulwahid Hasab Alrasool Masaad v Entry Clearance Officer - Croydon

Facts

The appellant is a citizen of Sudan who applied on 25 September 2024 for leave to enter the United Kingdom to join her husband, the sponsor, under the Refugee Family Reunion provisions of the Immigration Rules. The sponsor, also a Sudanese national, had been granted refugee status in the United Kingdom on 9 March 2022, having fled Sudan and travelled through multiple countries. The appellant's case was that the couple married on 15 February 2013 and lived together as husband and wife before the sponsor fled, and that they remain in a genuine and subsisting relationship maintained by regular messaging, financial remittances and a visit to Ethiopia at the end of 2023. By a decision dated 15 May 2025 the entry clearance officer refused the human rights claim, taking the point that the marriage certificate relied on post-dated the sponsor's flight, that there was insufficient evidence of a relationship before 2022, that untranslated message excerpts attracted little weight, that the appellant did not form part of the sponsor's pre-flight family unit, and that no valid tuberculosis certificate had been supplied. Following service of the appellant's evidence and skeleton argument, the respondent conducted a review on 20 February 2026 and maintained the refusal. The appeal came before the First-tier Tribunal at Taylor House, where the sponsor gave oral evidence through an Arabic interpreter as a vulnerable witness.