Last year the AIRE Centre introduced an internal case tracking system for European and UK litigation in order to help assess the scope and impact of our litigation work. The trackers reflect our efforts to incorporate short, medium, and long-term thinking in our overall litigation strategy:

• In the immediate term, these tools enable team members to monitor all active cases in real time. This includes identifying suitable cases and monitoring progress, deadlines for filing submissions, the publication of judgments and decisions, and the implementation of judgments. Additionally, we can evaluate the capacity of team members in real time, consider patterns o trends of decisions and judgments, and anticipate future deadlines.

• In the medium term, the trackers will serve as a repository of institutional memory, as they provide a collection of all of the cases we have been involved in, either as third-party interveners or as clients representatives, before international, regional, and domestic UK courts. They provide a ‘knowledge bank’ or database indicating the subject matter of the cases, the relevant legal instruments and alleged violations, and a summary of outcomes.

• In the longer-term, our objective is to use the tracking tools to measure the impact of our casework. This means we will reflect on how our arguments or submissions influenced the outcome in cases, the extent to which our submissions are reflected in judgments, whether we are having more success on certain thematic issues than others, and whether our collaborative efforts are fruitful. Our aim is ultimately to use the trackers to reflect on the cases where we have been successful in the past and why, and support our team to make the best possible decisions in respect of case selection.

To build these tracking tools, we worked in partnership with Reed Smith as part of the SQE Applied Project. We produced three tracking tools to monitor Europe litigation case work, domestic UK client work, and UK intervention work, and produced a Case Trackers User Guide to help the wider AIRE team keep the trackers up to date and use the information we have compiled.

Analysing the data: some initial results

• During the project, we populated the trackers with information about our case work from the last three years. We worked with Reed Smith to extract and analyse that data, seeking to identify any trends and patterns in AIRE’s overall impact in different types of cases during that period.  In respect of our European litigation work, the data suggests:

•  Across the whole sample of cases, the AIRE Centre either jointly or independently submitted 61 third-party interventions to the European Court of Human Rights

• The majority of our third-party interventions related to children’s rights and best interests of the child. This was closely followed by asylum and access to asylum procedures and deportation related cases.

• Two thirds of our third-party interventions were identified by AIRE’s internal case monitoring system (rather than, for example, through referrals from other organisations).

• 24 judgments or decisions have been issued for this period. The Court explicitly referred to our written submissions in its assessment in 16 cases, and has so far 8 resulted in a finding of a violation of ECHR rights. The remaining judgments are pending.

 

• We collaborated with more than 10 organisations during this time.

In terms of our domestic UK client work and intervention work:

•  The majority of our domestic case work concerned deportation appeals. 87% of cases represented by the AIRE Centre were taken on in the First-tier Tribunal, with 72% specifically before the Immigration and Asylum Chamber.

• AIRE’s representations achieved an 86% success rate in the FTT and the Upper Tribunal, and 100% success in appeals against the Department of Work and Pensions.

•  In terms of interventions and submissions, six third-party interventions were submitted before the Court of Appeal, four before the Supreme Court, three before the Upper Tribunal and two before the Hight Court.

• Our third-party submissions were directly referenced in five out of the ten judgments delivered during this period. 

The way forward

Overall, we believe these statistics demonstrate AIRE’s significant impact in both its European and domestic litigation work, and how our activities are helping to shape the development of the law across our key thematic areas of focus. And it is important to bear in mind that the data we have analysed reflects only a snapshot of the cases AIRE has pursued across its 30-year history. Looking forward, we will continue updating the tracker on a regular basis, refine our approach to collecting and analysing the data, and review the themes and outcomes of our cases on an annual basis, in order to understand how our impact is changing.