The Immigration Judge noted that in MM (Tier 1 PSW; Art 8; “private life”) Zimbabwe [2009] UKAIT 00037, it was held that a student in the United Kingdom on a temporary basis had no expectation of a right to remain in order to further social ties and relationships, where the criteria of the Points-Based System were not met and that the character of an individual’s private life was by its very nature of the type which could be formed elsewhere, albeit through different social ties.
Although the Court of Appeal in OA (Nigeria) [2008] EWCA Civ 82 had held that the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal had been entitled to conclude that a student’s Article 8 rights would be violated if she were removed from the United Kingdom in the middle of an academic year, the Tribunal in MM concluded that the prospects for bringing “a right to study case within Article 8 are bleak”. In this regard, the Tribunal in MMnoted the judgment of Laws LJ in LL (China) [2009] EWCA Civ 617, that “the appellant has on the facts effectively no Article 8 case unless her desire to complete the ACCA course of itself provides her with one, but I do not see that Article 8 can fulfil that function, at least on the facts of this case”.
