The MacDermott Annual Lecture 2023

The Rule of Law in Immigration, Nationality and Asylum

Professor Devyani Prabhat - University of Bristol

In this MacDermott Annual Lecture, Professor Devyani Prabhat will look at current developments in immigration, nationality and asylum law and evaluate these in terms of the core ingredients of the rule of law. Specifically, the focus will be on two aspects of the rule of law as elaborated on by Lord Bingham in his classic exposition on the rule of law (The Rule of Law, Penguin Law, 2011). First, Bingham asserts that, "Questions of legal right and liability should ordinarily be resolved by application of the law and not the exercise of discretion" is a fundamental requirement of the rule of law and, second, Bingham states that "the rule of law requires compliance by the state with its obligations in international law as in national law". The examples Professor Prabhat will analyse in the lecture are that of immigration control of EU nationals in the UK after Brexit, developments in cancellation of British Citizenship, and new legislation on asylum in the UK. Do these recent changes in the scope and application of the law comply with the rule of law in general and with the two specific principles on ‘law not discretion’ and ‘international law compliance’ in particular?

Dr Devyani Prabhat is a Professor of Law at University of Bristol Law School, UK, with legal practice experience in Constitutional law. She researches and teaches Public Law (Migration, Citizenship, Constitutional Rights) from a socio-legal and comparative perspective. She has a LLM and a PhD from New York University and is admitted as an Attorney at Law, New York. She is an ESRC research grant holder on British Citizenship with follow up impact funding and related grants. Her main project was on the gaining, holding, and loss of citizenship. She supervises doctoral students in public law, human rights law, and migration law topics. Professor Prabhat has written and edited a number of books. Her monograph Unleashing the Force of Law: Legal Mobilization, National Security, Basic Freedoms ( Palgrave Macmillan) won the Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship (Society of Legal Scholars). Her book with Policy Press, Britishness, Belonging and Citizenship is available open access at http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=647390