How to apply for a UK EEA Family Permit after previously receiving a refusal for a visit visa?

Question

I'm a non-EEA citizen married to a Spanish citizen. She and I got married two weeks ago. We both live in Palestine and we are planning to travel to the UK in January 2018.

Back in September, I submitted a Standard Visit Visa application to the UK. In October I received a refusal for not submitting documents showing the origin of cash-flow shown on my bank account statements.

Now we are married and would like to apply for the UK family permit visa. Do I have to be worried about the past visit visa refusal? It's recent, and when I apply for the Family Permit start of January 2018 we'd be married for two months only. We will be visiting the UK together.

What documents should I submit along with my application? I imagine that I should mention my past refusal?

Are we supposed to register our marriage with the Spanish government first? or is the translated\certified Palestinian contract\certificate ample evidence of our marriage?

Please take into consideration the following notes:

We are married and we have the marriage papers translated into the English language and certified.

We got married in Palestine and the marriage contract\certificate is Palestinian.

We haven't yet registered our marriage with the Spanish authorities since we do not intend to move to Spain anytime soon. Additionally, registration takes time so we might do it later.

Answer 1

You do not need to worry about the prior refusal, except that you should of course mention it when you are asked whether you have ever been refused in the past. My mother in law received an EEA family permit a couple of years ago just a few weeks after being refused for a standard visitor visa.

If you fail to mention the refusal, it's quite possible that it will be held against you if you ever try to apply for a UK visa after the UK leaves the EU.

The UK government's page on this visa is at https://www.gov.uk/family-permit. You should submit the documents mentioned there. In particular, you need to show three things:

• Your passport
• Evidence of your wife's EEA nationality
• Evidence showing that you are in a qualifying relationship

You do not need to show that you are dependent on your wife because being dependent is only a requirement for other kinds of family relationships, not for spouses or registered partners. You do not need to worry about your wife being a "qualified person" because she has not already been in the UK for over three months.

You should note that because your marriage is recent, you are likely to be asked to prove that it is genuine. That is, the entry clearance officer (ECO) is likely to suspect that your marriage is a "marriage of convenience" entered into in order to get you into the UK. You should probably therefore submit evidence showing that your relationship is genuine.

In particular, establishing that you have lived together is supposed to rule out conclusively any suspicion; here's what the EEA family permit guidance has to say about it:

The ECO should not consider the following cases as marriages / civil partnerships of convenience where:

• there is a child of the relationship;
• there is evidence to suggest cohabitation.

If you can show that you have lived together then you should not worry about submitting photographs, communications records, and the like.