Dabo v Home Secretary: no linear test for broken integration

The Court of Appeal has dismissed the Home Secretary's appeal in Mohammed Sury Dabo v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWCA Civ 907, holding that a tribunal assessing social and cultural integration under section 117C(4)(b) of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 is not required to ask whether offending broke the continuity of an earlier integration. Lady Justice Andrews gave the leading judgement, with Moylan and Zacaroli LJJ agreeing.

Mr Dabo, a Guinean national born in 1990, arrived as an unaccompanied asylum-seeking child in March 2007 and has been an overstayer since October 2011. Three asylum claims have failed. In November 2016 he was sentenced at Swansea Crown Court to two years and eight months for four counts of possession of Class A drugs with intent to supply, a county lines case in which he ran drugs into Swansea. By the time of his First-tier Tribunal hearing he had 19 convictions for 34 offences, together with a further 18 month sentence for robbery imposed in 2018 and a 32 week sentence for possession of a bladed article in 2022.

First-tier Tribunal Judge G Clarke rejected the protection claim but allowed the Article 8 private life appeal, finding both that Mr Dabo was socially and culturally integrated in the United Kingdom and that very compelling circumstances existed. The Upper Tribunal upheld that decision. There was no challenge to the very compelling circumstances conclusion itself, the Home Secretary's case being that flaws in the two constituent evaluations would infect the overall balance and require remittal.

Andrews LJ described the integration finding as, on its face, somewhat surprising given the ties established and the offending history, but noted the Home Secretary's acceptance that it was within the range reasonably open to the judge, citing Baroness Hale in R (MM) (Lebanon) on the difference between a generous view of the facts and an error of law.

On ground one, counsel for the Home Secretary relied on Binbuga for the proposition that the judge should have asked whether offending had broken such integration as existed before it began. Andrews LJ rejected the extrapolation. CI (Nigeria) is the guideline authority and requires a holistic assessment of integration as at the date of hearing, with offending and imprisonment considered as part of that assessment rather than through a linear chronological lens. Leggatt LJ's warning against treating offending as severing ties by its very nature, irrespective of actual effects, and against requiring integrative links to be shown to have re-formed, was central. There may be cases where pre-offending integration is so limited that later criminality expunges it, but that is a finding of fact, not a required analytical step.

The judge's paragraph 161 was succinct, and Andrews LJ accepted a fuller explanation would have been preferable. The word "nonetheless", following his reference to a chequered adult life of homelessness and repeated offending, indicated that he had turned his mind to the impact of those matters, and the present tense showed he was addressing the position at the hearing. That was, she held, just about sufficient.

Ground two, that the judge identified obstacles to reintegration in Guinea without evaluating whether they were very significant, also failed. Ackom was distinguished: where identified obstacles are by their nature serious enough to prevent or seriously inhibit reintegration, no further articulation is needed. The finding that Mr Dabo would not be enough of an insider was in substance a finding meeting the elevated threshold, reinforced by findings of no kinship support, no resources, no accommodation and a likely deterioration in mental health amounting to possible destitution.

The appeal was dismissed on both grounds.