DAVID BLUNKETT’S drive to stop multiple asylum applications suffered a setback yesterday when a High Court judge ruled that he had acted unlawfully in blocking claims.

Mr Justice Maurice Kay said that the Home Secretary had wrongly interpreted the law when he tried to stop successive asylum claims by one Kosovan family. A lawyer for the Home Secretary said after the ruling that there was concern in the Home Office after recent court cases over Mr Blunkett’s freedom to interpret his own policies.

The case involved Ali Gashi, an ethnic Albanian who arrived in England in 1998 by lorry and claimed to be fleeing Serbian paramilitary forces. Mr Gashi was ordered to leave the country and make his asylum claim in Italy, the first safe country he had entered.

But he said that he had already been expelled from Italy and claimed the right to have his application dealt with in Britain on the ground that his wife, Lumturie, and their children, Elida, then 15, and Erido, then 8, had arrived separately in Britain in October 2000.

Under the “family ties” policy, applicants who would normally be removed to a safe third country are allowed to stay in Britain when other members of their family are making similar applications. The right ends if the family member fails to win asylum.

Mr Gashi was allowed to stay in Britain until his wife lost her plea for asylum in April 2001, and he was then told he could no longer stay in the country. But Mr Gashi said he should be allowed to stay because his daughter, Elida, had subsequently made her own asylum application.

Lawyers for the Home Secretary said that amounted to “a deliberate attempt to circumvent the rules by making a duplicate application”.

Ashley Underwood, QC, appearing for Mr Blunkett, told the High Court in London: “It would be remarkable if he operated a policy which encouraged a drip-feed of claims by dependants.”

The judge ruled that Mr Blunkett had adopted a false construction of his own policy. The judge said he found it understandable that the Home Secretary had “an eye on potential abuse”, but said that did not entitle him “to supplant the plain meaning of the policy with a preferred interpretation which is not a reasonable one”.

The judge added: “The interpretation relied on by the Secretary of State was not reasonably open to him.” To describe Elida’s application as a “duplicate” application of her mother’s was less than fair as it was based on a “traumatic” experience in Kosovo and there was no resemblance between the two applications. It was also “inappropriate” to attach the pejorative label “drip-feed”.

It is understood that the ruling set a precedent for several other similar actions. Mr Blunkett’s lawyers asked for leave to appeal.

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