The second Statement of Changes to the Immigration Rules this week landed today: HC 1715. It adds Dominica, Honduras, Namibia, Timor-Leste and Vanuatu to the list of countries whose nationals require a visa to travel to the UK as a visitor. The change has been introduced with immediate effect, from 3pm 19 July 2023.
The explanatory statement to the rules also states that the UK is repudiating an international visa treaty with Honduras on grounds of “public policy”. This is allowed for in the treaty, apparently. We can expect reciprocal visa regimes to be imposed on British citizens travelling to at least some of these countries, I would guess.
The explanatory statement itself does not say why the change is being made. It is very likely to be because of an increase in asylum claims from nationals of at least some of these countries, though.
| 2020 Q1 | 2020 Q2 | 2020 Q3 | 2020 Q4 | 2021 Q1 | 2021 Q2 | 2021 Q3 | 2021 Q4 | 2022 Q1 | 2022 Q2 | 2022 Q3 | 2022 Q4 | 2023 Q1 | |
| Dominica | 3 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 5 | 7 | 3 | 4 | 10 | 7 |
| East Timor | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 7 | 0 | 6 | 2 |
| Honduras | 54 | 9 | 10 | 68 | 43 | 67 | 77 | 158 | 145 | 147 | 180 | 317 | 275 |
| Namibia | 94 | 35 | 19 | 80 | 21 | 17 | 8 | 91 | 98 | 146 | 149 | 258 | 382 |
| Vanuatu | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
It’s quite hard to see why Dominica, East Timor and Vanuatu have been added to the visa national list, though. At the time of the latest immigration statistics, there had literally been four asylum claims by nationals of Vanuatu since 2020. Perhaps that has recently changed.
Or perhaps the justification is nothing to do with asylum. There have previously been suggestions that visa regimes would be imposed on countries with ‘golden passport’ schemes which allow citizens of other countries easily to purchase the citizenship of another. Presumably there will be a ministerial statement at some point, at which time we’ll update this blog post.
