Haemophilia

gladiatorjw

Gladiatorjw

You or your friends could also try searching Austlii. Below is the link to a case where a child was refused a visa last year because he had haemophilia. If you read the section marked "evidence" you can discover some of the details. Basically, the Medical Officer of the Commonwealth calculated that the child would be likely to need blood-products which would cost around $750,000 during his lifetime. The MRT found that that cost would be excessive, and would also require the provision of medical and-or other resources which are in short supply. The case is:

This case might yet come before the Court, I would guess. With the particular child-visa concerned, the relevant medical criterion is 4007. That allows for a waiver of the health criteria on compbuttionate or compelling grounds. Seligman is the authority for the proposition that a very sick child can sometimes rely on the waiver, though the applicant really only won it because the Court held that a particular sub-clause was invalid and must be ignored. Soon after Seligman, the medical criteria were re-written to get rid of the deficiency. Therefore Seligman is old Law, and none-too-reliable for that reason. However, it does still get cited the whole time. .

Polly is right, though. Your friends would have a very steep hill to climb here, in all probability, and they would definitely need advice from Peter Bollard or from Mark Webster (an Agency called Acacia, but if you tell a search engine to look for Mark Webster + Migration Agent, he will come up.)

In a case such as that of your friends, one of the most important aspects would be to consider what type of visa to apply for, because not all of them carry a right of appeal, and in most categories, 4005 seems to be the relevant medical criterion. 4005 does not contain a waiver-provision, so it tends to be enforced pretty strictly.

A possibility would be send a print out of the case to the child's specialist, and ask him or her to consider the child in the light of it. The specialist ought to be able to take a pretty shrewd guess at the likely costs involved if Australia were to accept the young man. It does all boil down to money and the scarcity of resources, unfortunately, but every medical case is decided solely on its own facts and the medical opinion resulting from them.

A child-case called Robinson is wending its way through the Court at the moment. In that case, the child has Down Syndrome, but his own specialists are saying that it is only a very mild case of Down, and that the child will be able to lead a normal life once he grows up. The solicitors handling the case are acting pro bono, so they plainly think that an important principle of Law is at stake. They would be unlikely to act pro bono unless they believe that they have a reasonable chance of success with their argument, I suspect. I think that the issues in Robinson are unlikely to be heard by the Court until later this year. Also, if the applicant succeeds in the Fed Court, DIMA might well appeal to the Full Court. The latter could reverse the Fed Court's decision, so at this stage, it is far too early to predict the eventual outcome of Robinson. However, if the applicant succeeds in the end, this will be a ground-breaking case, so it is definitely one to keep an eye on, I think.

I hope all this might be of some help, but please understand that I am not a Migration Agent. I am a complete amateur with these visas, and only know the case-Law because I have had to make a particular study of it on behalf of a family-member of mine, where the applicant is an adult, Cr 4005 applies, and the medical condition is totally different from that of your friends' child. I can give you information, but I cannot give you advice..

Regards

Gill Palmer