Dear All,
I have had one year of residency in Holland. My MVV visa was granted on September 16, 2006. My dutch residence permit was valid till August 2007, and there was also a temporary permit sticker on my passport valid till November 2007.
In total, I had 14 months of lawful residency. i will include all those stickers and permits and ask them to re-send my file to berlin. As for accra, i do not think i have that patience to wait. This last two years wait is already devastating, not to talk of another additional two years.
I do not live in holland anymore. I live in naija, and really, almost all my documents are fom naija, and like you rightly said, for personal intergrity issues, accra is the best office to do verification, BUT LAW IS LAW, and as such berlin office should deal with my application.
Comments, suggestions? thanks all.
I do feel you on this one, it is hard to take. You might want to seek some expert legal advise on this issue. Shame, Mr Cohen does not accept to take on cases halfway. Try to take some time to go through the manual posted above, it is very rich in content, and sections 5.16 & 5.17 specifically addresses the issue at hand, it also highlights avenues to lodge complaints if you do feel your application has been treated in a way that is contrary to laid-down procedures.
IMHO, it appears CiC has misapplied the rules, and the reasons they have given for the file transfer(less than 1year residency) does not seem applicable to you, so you might have a case. BUT then, after pointing out the folly in their actions, they can still turn around later and insist that their visa office is ill-equipped to process it under the PROGRAM INTEGRITY factor, and there is nothing anyone one can do about that, it would be a dead end. See below, an excerpt from the manual Section 5.17
“Change of status during processing of application
For applicants whose legal status in the country where they made their application changes or
expires before the processing of their application has been completed, processing will be
completed in the office where it was submitted.
However, if an office concludes that it cannot continue to process the application without
jeopardizing the integrity of the program, that office must notify the applicant that it cannot process
the application and that the application will be transferred to the office that handles the new
country of residence or nationality”
So, to me, it's a bit dicey. They have transferred your file to Accra for the wrong reasons, but in getting them to correct that – you will also be alerting them to a strong and foolproof reason to transfer the file to Accra, and once they invoke the program integrity clause - its non-debatable.
If you've the time to engage them, by all means carry on, all the information you need is in the manual, you've got nothing to lose by the way. Make your submissions, and forward it to them, and you may also state in your submission that you expect them to comply with the standard response times stated in the manual, failing which you would have to escalate to a higher level as stated in the procedural guide. And if you've got the dough to engage a consultant, do so, but check whatever the consultant says along with the Procedural manual to be sure.
Hopefully, some other folks will share their own thoughts with you, on this matter. My own suggestion is just based largely on the little i have read, and what i have seen happen in a few cases. Its largely theoretical, and i've always been reminded that there is a wide gulf between theory and actual practice. Wishing you all the best.
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