London, July 31: The government has suffered a serious setback in its efforts to reduce sham marriages after Law Lords, Britain’s equivalent of India’s Supreme Court, ruled yesterday that the Home Office was guilty of infringing the human rights of foreigners.

British law jealously guards the right of any citizen to marry anyone he or she chooses.

However, the law was being abused by those who were using a “sham marriage” or a “marriage of convenience” to a person entitled to reside in Britain to get round immigration controls.

But in three test cases, the Home Office lost in the High Court and in the Court of Appeal and yesterday suffered the final humiliation in a judgement delivered by the Law Lords.

While some newspapers are interpreting the government defeat as a green light from the Law Lords to illegal migrants to continue with the practice of sham marriages, the judge acted because they felt foreigners were being discriminated against unfairly by the Home Office.

The Law Lords said that the Home Office had interfered in an “arbitrary and unjust” way in the rights of 15,000 people. Ministers argued that the rules were vital to tackle illegal immigration and sham marriages but conceded they will need to be reformed.

The controversial Home Office powers on marriages were introduced in February 2005. The rules meant people who were not legally permanently settled in the UK were obliged to seek special permission to marry, irrespective of the status of their partner.

The measures were brought in after registrars complained they had no way of stopping bogus marriage rackets. The regulations meant couples had to pay up to Pound600 in fees to get permission to marry. But the powers were challenged in April 2006 when three couples alleged their human rights had been breached.

In the first case the Home Secretary had refused permission to marry to Mahmoud Baiai, 37, an Algerian illegal immigrant, and Izabella Trzcinska, 28, from Poland, who was in the UK legally.

The two other cases related to asylum seekers, including one individual who had been told to leave the country, but wanted to marry someone already given protection as a refugee. All three were later given permission to marry.

In his ruling against the Home Office, Lord Bingham said immigration rules, as well as the right to respect for family life under the European Convention, gave protection to some migrants who marry in the UK - even if they had limited or no leave to enter or stay. He added that the Immigration Directorate had issued instructions, without clear parliamentary approval, to deny permission to marry under certain circumstances.

“The vice of the scheme is that none of these conditions, although of course relevant to immigration status, has any relevance to the genuineness of a proposed marriage," he said.

The ruling was welcomed by some campaigners, including the chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, Habib Rahman, who said the government’s policy was now “in tatters”.

“It’s a great day for human rights, for justice and for migrant communities,” Rahman commented. “The government will have to go back to the drawing board.”

Solicitor Amit Sachdev, who represented three of the claimants in the case, described the marriage legislation as “draconian, misconceived and ill thought-out”.

The scale of sham marriages is unknown, although senior registrars suggested that before the new legislation there could have been at least 10,000 a year. There have been a number of successful prosecutions of Indians.

Registrars at Brent Council in north London suggested in 2005 that a fifth of all marriages there were bogus, with officials able to spot couples who barely knew each other.

According to Home Office figures, since the new checks were introduced the number of suspicious marriage reports received from registrars fell from 3,740 in 2004 to fewer than 300 by the end of May 2005. Between January and August 2006, there were only 149 such reports, it said.

Despite this defeat, other changes are being introduced, for example to stop “forced marriages”.

The minimum age at which someone can apply for a marriage visa is being raised to 21, although the legal age of marriage is 16. It is believed that a third of known forced marriage cases involve victims aged 21 and younger.

Other key proposals include: asking foreign spouses to learn English before they come to the UK; revoking leave to remain visas if border officers suspect the marriage is forced; requiring people to register their intention to marry overseas before they leave the UK for the wedding; and ensuring that specialist teams are trained to identify people who might be at risk of being forced into an unwanted marriage.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said forcing people to marry leads to “years of physical and mental abuse”, and can result in imprisonment and rape.

“It has no place in our society,” she said.