Abstract
On 8 and 9 June 2011, the Supreme Court in the UK heard an appeal (in which Southall Black Sisters (SBS) intervened) regarding the gov- ernment’s immigration policy on the minimum age for marriage to a non-European Economic Area (EEA) national. The background to the ‘Quila’ case lay in the state’s policy to combat forced marriages using immigration controls as one of its main strategies. In November 2008, the then Labour government had raised the minimum age for a per- son seeking a visa for the purposes of settling in the UK as a spouse, ]or sponsoring another for the purposes of obtaining such a visa, from 18 to 21.3
Forced marriages are an appalling evil. Most commonly the vic- tims are young women and all too often such marriages occur within the immigrant community... This is often associated with assisting a claim for UK residency and citizenship.
(Lord Brown dissenting from the majority judgment in the ‘Quila’ case)1
Forced Marriage will be a problem for as long as we have mass migration.
(The Telegraph, 7 June 2012)2
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References
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Patel, P. (2014). ‘Moral Panics’ and ‘Social Evils’: Forced Marriage and Gender-Related Violence in Immigration Law and Policy in the UK. In: Anthias, F., Pajnik, M. (eds) Contesting Integration, Engendering Migration. Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137294005_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137294005_12
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