qaim wrote:I have met her during my last trip to the UK, which was just a couple of weeks back. I went to her house and met the family as well. My family has been in touch with her family over the phone ever since. But how can I prove my meeting to the Registrar or UKBA, as the purpose of my last visit wasn't exactly that.
The reason why you met is irrelevant. As long as you've met. Do you have any pictures? The more the better, especially with her and her family.
qaim wrote:
I was in the UK on an ordinary visit. Although I had been in touch with this girl and her family for a long time but it was our first physical meeting.
Honestly speaking, what I fear is that if they reject my marriage visit visa application, I will loose both my current long term visit visa as well as the opportunity to go and marry her legally. Another problem is that I am now in Saudi Arabia and I can't have her visit me on a visit visa and get married because she has to be a legal resident here for that.
I can't see them rejecting your marriage visit visa application unless there is some other reason that you have not mentioned here (finances, age, criminal/terrorist backgrounds). If you were to receive that visa, it would supplant your other visitor visa though. So that might be an issue for you regarding your original purpose of having that visa, depending on when/if you wanted to come for settlement.
qaim wrote:The only bit which is still slightly concerning is that whether one can 'possibly' face issues with later applications for settlement visa, as the change of intention thing is difficult to establish, to say the least. Moreover, the UKBA do not even commit to acknowledging such a change of mind in writing, so they can use it against you if they wish to do so.
If your previous visa was a Marriage Visitor visa, the natural expectation would be that your next visa to enter to the UK would either be a Spouse settlement visa, or a visitor visa where you are coming to take your wife and bring her back to your home country with you. But if instead you apply for a Exceptional Talent visa, and Ancestry visa, or a Tier 2 sponsored work permit, or whatever, etc... each of those visa applications will be decided on their own merit based on the amount and validity of evidence you give. There's absolutely no doubt that they will note that your are married to a UK resident. You would almost certainly be asked why you didn't apply for the Spouse settlement. But if your intentions are true and sound, and your evidence is satisfactory, your visa should be approved. They won't hold your getting married against you. It is a normal part of life. In fact, I would say that, although they are not allowed to hold any negative immigration history against you for a Spouse settlement visa, they would probably look at your applying for and adhering to all of the correct visas for your previous trips as a big positive.
MPH80 wrote:
The issue UKBA have is that they can't actually stop someone getting married (without arresting them)
Well the Home Office directly, no. But a registrar can refuse to perform for any of a large set of valid reasons that they come up with. And if one of those reasons is that the Home Office informed them that the bride's passport was stolen, then that is certainly more than enough good reason to refuse.
MPH80 wrote:- and it wouldn't surprise me if the investigation time is, in the end, found to be in breach of a right or two. What they can do is buy themselves time to note that this is probably a fraudulent marriage and then make the appropriate choice when the spouse visa lands.
Maybe, but I'm not so sure... As far as human rights are concerned, the UK is in a non-binding agreement, made more binding by its membership in the EU. Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights wrote:
Article 16(1)Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
When the COA was overturned, it was because it actively would disallow a marriage the UK government deemed a marriage of convenience. It's easy to see how that could prevent a perfectly willing and capable couple from otherwise getting married because they were not of the same religion, they were from different ethnic backgrounds, and/or they were from different countries. In fact, in the case that challenged this process, all three of those criteria I listed were met, and presumably were the reasons for the refusal. One thing to note here was that the cost of the COA was going up and up, with no reason to believe there was any end in sight to the amount they were charging. This likewise implied a possible financial burden that was unfair.
When I and my wife applied for the now defunct COA, we had to wait about 6-weeks for the certificates to come back iirc. We couldn't make any plans until we had them, which was frustrating as well as degrading. And the fact that a government, any government, could simply not approve of whom I want to marry is something I've still never truly forgiven. I was required to write a letter explaining ourselves, to accompany the application. In that letter I explained rather bluntly that whether they 'approved' or not, we were going to get legally married anyway, either in the U.S. or India. And that their 'approval' of our marriage was completely irrelevant to the unalterable fact that it was happening anyway.
So if they simply can now inform a registrar that they don't think marriage because the couple fits the profile of a marriage of convenience, and the burden is now an extended time frame instead of a pile of money, is that any more or less right than an offensive COA? What would be the result of the lawsuit if it was overruled? And what if they drop the whole profiling perspective and simply do document checking, looking into whether utility bills are forged, passports are fake, photos staged, etc.... If they limit their checks strictly to just that, would anybody really have a human rights challenge?
) I did not quite understand how you differed on that statement except that you just added the intention bit more explicitly, which I feel is something ambigious and can be scrutinised or even dismissed easily by the UKBA. 