High Court upholds UK student visa ban on Afghan, Cameroonian, Burmese and Sudanese nationals

The High Court in London has upheld a rule that bars nationals of Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan from obtaining a United Kingdom student visa, dismissing two linked judicial reviews brought by seven students. The judgment of Mrs Justice Steyn, R (Sadat and others; Farah and others) v Secretary of State for the Home Department, neutral citation [2026] EWHC 2157 (Admin), was handed down remotely at 10.30am on 12 August 2026 after a rolled up hearing on 27, 28 and 29 July 2026. The judge granted permission to apply for judicial review on all grounds save two, then dismissed the claims.

The measure at issue is paragraph ST 3.3 of Appendix Student of the Immigration Rules, inserted by the Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules HC 1691, laid before Parliament on 5 March 2026 and effective from 26 March 2026. Officials call it the Student Visa Brake. A parallel Skilled Worker Brake applies to Afghan nationals and was not challenged. The judgment records the Home Secretary's own estimate that over the 18 months from 26 March 2026 the student measure will prevent about 4,300 student visas being issued to nationals of the four countries, and will reduce asylum claims from people arriving on student visas by about 1,300.

The rationale set out in the Explanatory Memorandum is that asylum claims by people who arrived on a visa or other leave have nearly tripled since the year ending September 2022, and that in the year ending September 2025, 38 per cent, or 41,100, of asylum seekers had previously entered the UK on a visa or other documented leave. Around 106,000 asylum seekers were receiving state funded support. For the four nationalities specifically, the memorandum records 15,906 people in receipt of Home Office support as at September 2025, including 6,412 in hotels.

The policy sits awkwardly with the government's own asylum blueprint. Restoring Order and Control, the asylum and returns policy statement published on 21 November 2025, uses closely comparable figures, 41,100 of 111,800 claimants arriving first by legal means, but proposes to attack the problem through withdrawal of asylum support and treatment of returns to the home country as evidence of unmeritorious claims. It does not propose restricting visa issuance by nationality. The brake, announced roughly three and a half months later, does exactly that.

The Sudanese claimants, two doctors and a pharmacist, argued that the choice of nationalities rested irrationally on a conversion rate from visa to asylum claim, and that the Home Secretary never asked whether there was evidence of visa abuse by Sudanese nationals or whether alternatives existed. The court rejected each ground. It also rejected the argument that the Home Secretary had fettered her residual discretion to grant leave outside the rules, finding that caseworker guidance did not misstate the law and that statements about refusal applied to decisions under the Rules themselves.

The most contested ground was sex discrimination. Afghan women and girls have been barred from secondary and higher education since shortly after the Taliban takeover in 2021, a position the government has itself described as an extreme example of restrictions on women's rights. The claimants said that impact was so obviously material that it could not lawfully be left out of account, relying on R (Marouf) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2023] UKSC 23. Steyn J accepted the force of the common law equality principle but held that the brake is an inward facing border control measure, unlike the overseas decisions in the Pergau Dam and Chagos cases, and that the Home Secretary was not rationally obliged to treat immigration rules as the appropriate vehicle for addressing discrimination abroad. She added that it would have been open to the Home Secretary to consider an exception, and that it was unfortunate, but no more than that, that Afghan women appeared in the decision papers under the headings of reputational risk and parliamentary handling.

On the other three countries the government put forward counter figures that the court found the claimants had not answered. In Myanmar, as at October 2025, 29.3 per cent of young women had attained higher education against 24.2 per cent of young men. In Cameroon in 2022 the secondary completion rate was 35.6 per cent for girls and 35.2 per cent for boys. In Sudan, where an estimated 19 million children were out of school in October 2023 and at least 10,400 schools had closed, the claimants supplied no comparative data on men and women entering higher education.

The practical effect landed within weeks. The PIE News reported on 13 August 2026 that Sudan Scholars UK says fully funded master's students holding places at Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London and University College London cannot start in September, and that an appeal is planned. Oxford agreed to hold the claimants' offers open to 31 August. The Russell Group has put the affected cohort at under 0.6 per cent of international students in the UK.

What is not yet known is whether permission to appeal will be granted, whether the Home Office estimates of 4,300 blocked visas and 1,300 avoided claims survive contact with the data, and how many applications the leave outside the rules route will in fact rescue.