A legal challenge mounted by seven international students seeking to study in the United Kingdom has been rejected by the High Court.
The group, which included two medical professionals from Sudan who had received offers from Oxford University, contested a Home Office restriction on student visa applications for nationals of four specific nations.
Mrs Justice Steyn delivered her ruling on August 12, dismissing the claims brought forward against the Government’s immigration policy.
The restriction, termed the Student Visa Brake, was implemented on March 26 and specifically targets applicants from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan.
The two Sudanese doctors at the centre of the case were Dr Razan Awad Fageer Farah and Dr Rawan Raad Hassan Elrufai.
Both had secured places to pursue master’s level studies at Oxford, with Dr Farah accepted onto the Applied Digital Health programme and Dr Elrufai admitted to the International Health and Tropical Medicine course.
The university indicated it would honour these offers until the end of August while court proceedings continued.
Additionally, Dr Elrufai’s Africa Oxford Initiative Mastercard scholarship remained in abeyance pending the outcome of the litigation.
A third claimant, Linda Leogah Forkwa from Cameroon, held an offer to pursue a DPhil in Geography and the Environment at Oxford.
She had also received an acceptance from King’s College London and had submitted an application for a Commonwealth PhD Scholarship.
The judicial review centred on amendments to immigration regulations enacted by the Home Secretary in March.
The provision, formally designated as Appendix Student ST 3.3, renders nationals of the four countries unable to submit applications for student visas permitting entry to the UK.
Government projections indicated the measure would block approximately 4,300 student visa grants over a period of eighteen months and decrease associated asylum claims by roughly 1,300 applications.
Those bringing the case contended the policy was unreasonable and discriminatory.
They disputed the criteria used to determine which nations would be affected and submitted that ministers had not adequately assessed consequences for women, particularly in Afghanistan where females are barred from accessing higher education.
The Sudanese applicants further argued that the Government’s application of a Conversion Rate metric to identify target countries lacked rational basis.
This methodology involved comparing the volume of visas issued to nationals of a particular country against the number of subsequent asylum applications connected to that entry route.
The judge determined that the Home Secretary’s application of the data fell within acceptable parameters of reasonable decision-making.
She found the approach was neither arbitrary nor illogical.
In her assessment, Mrs Justice Steyn acknowledged that those impacted by the restriction included highly motivated individuals who had obtained places at leading academic institutions and, in certain instances, secured funding for their studies.
She recognised that blocking access to higher education could produce significant and enduring effects on their futures.
However, she clarified that the case fundamentally involved a policy determination concerning immigration control and wider public interest matters for which the Home Secretary carries constitutional accountability.
The judge dismissed all claims in full, ruling that the Secretary of State had acted within the law when introducing the Student Visa Brake and that all grounds of challenge advanced by the students must fail.
While granting permission to proceed with judicial review on the majority of arguments raised, the claims were ultimately dismissed in their entirety.