Transnational Marriage Abandonment.

Transnational Marriage Abandonment (TMA) refers to the plight of migrant women who are taken abroad and left without resources by their British national partners, who they depend on entirely for their social and financial survival. The processes of marriage and migration creates transnational spaces that are not only conducive to new forms of violence and harms against women but also creates impunity for perpetrators and immunity for states that use legal loopholes to evade responsibility for safeguarding and protecting women subject to abandonment. TMA is therefore a form of abuse that is both transnational and gendered since it is located within a continuum of violence coercive and control experienced by migrant women.

The Fight for Recognition and Justice

For many years the plight of migrant women brought to the UK for the purposes of marriage and then abused and abandoned in their countries of origin, was ignored, resulting in great hardships and injustice. Women are often abandoned with their children or separated from them and forced to live in conditions of destitution, isolation, discrimination and exploitation. They are trapped in faltering marriages and in circumstances that involve the deliberate infraction of their legal rights to protection, financial support, children and rehabilitation. Until recently, this problem was little understood in law, policy and practice in the UK and many women were denied re-entry to the UK to engage, in particular, in family law proceedings where issues of custody of children and financial support are decided.

It has taken seven years of painstaking legal work, lobbying and campaigning to raise awareness of TMA and to bring about change that provides a level of justice and protection for abandoned women. The turning point came with the case of "AM" (pseudonym).

The Change

The case of AM, R (On the Application Of) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2022] EWHC 2591 (Admin) (14 October 2022) established that the failure of the Home Office to put women abandoned abroad in the same position as victims of domestic abuse who have arrived under spousal visas and are in the UK amounted to unlawful discrimination.

In a landmark ruling, the High Court held that, by not making provisions for abandoned women within immigration law and policy, the Home Office unlawfully discriminated against them in respect of their right to family life (Article 8). The Ruling drew upon the witness statement of Pragna Patel, who has led this work for many years.

Following the High Court ruling, a working group on TMA that had been established to influence immigration policy worked with the Home Office for several months to implement changes in immigration rules and policy to give effect to the High Court ruling. Eventually, in January 2024, the Home Office issued new guidance for immigration caseworkers on how to process applications for transnational marriage abandonment.