Human Rights Act
Article 8: Right to Respect for Private and Family Life
Family life
This element of Article 8 protects your right to respect for your close family relationships and matters relating to those relationships, for example how parents choose to discipline their children. The question of whether a relationship will fall within the ambit of ‘family life’ for the purposes of Article 8 will depend on the nature of the relationship and the existence of close personal ties. In addition to the relationship between a mother and father and between children and their parents, ‘family life’ will include unmarried couples and the relationship between an illegitimate child and either parent as well as other family relationships, for example relationships between siblings and between adopted children and adoptive parents.
The ECHR has so far been reluctant to recognise same-sex couples as families, holding that these relationships fall within the ambit of private life - not family life
Separation of family members will normally constitute an interference with the right to respect for family life, although such interference may be justified, for example where a child is taken into care for his or her own protection or where a parent is sentenced to imprisonment.
Family life can be engaged in deportation cases if the person to be deported has an established personal and family life in the UK (for example, if the person has children living and settled in the UK). However, the courts have been reluctant to find that deportation is a violation of Article 8. Where there is an alternative country in which the husband and wife or family can reside and there are no ‘insurmountable obstacles’ to moving there, or where a person could return to their country of origin and obtain entry clearance as a family member in the ordinary way without risk or excessive delay it is unlikely that the court will find that there has been a violation of Article 8.