Helena Wray gave the fourth Sarah van Walsum lecture, titled 'Legal issues in family migration.'
In her lecture, Helena Wray discussed the UK Supreme Court’s case law on article 8 and family reunification as a reflection of the politicisation of the issue, of competing understandings of the judicial function in a democracy and of understandings of citizenship.
Dr Helena Wray is Associate Professor in Migration Law. She has researched and published extensively, with a particular focus on legal issues in family migration. She is editor of Journal of Immigration Asylum and Nationality and has led or been involved in several research and consultancy projects. She led teams which provided expert evidence in two test cases heard in the Supreme Court, Ali and Bibi v SSHD on pre-entry language testing for spouses, and the key case of MM v SSHD on the onerous financial conditions to be met by the sponsors of migrant spouses and partners. In 2015, she was the lead author of a major report, commissioned by the Children’s Commissioner for England from Middlesex University and Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants and launched in Parliament, on the impact of the financial requirements in the family migration rules on children. In 2013, she gave written and oral evidence in the House of Commons at the All Party Parliamentary Group on Migration’s Enquiry into Family Migration.