The Secretary of State appealed against a decision that a scheme established under section 19 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc) Act 2004 involved a disproportionate interference with the respondents' right to marry under Article 12 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Section 19 applied to persons subject to immigration control and to all United Kingdom marriages save for Anglican marriages. The Secretary of State accepted that the distinction between Anglican and civil marriage contained within section 19 was discriminatory and undertook to remove it. Under the terms of section 19, the applicants were required to obtain the written permission of the Secretary of State before they could marry. Application for such permission required payment of a fee and permission would only be granted (in the absence of especially compassionate features) if the applicant had been granted the right to remain in the United Kingdom for at least six months and there were at least three months of that period remaining at the time of application. The House observed that the right to marry under Article 12 was a ‘strong’ right. National authorities were entitled to impose reasonable conditions on the right of a third-country national to marry for the purposes of ascertaining whether the marriage in question was a marriage of convenience and therefore not a genuine marriage warranting the protection of Article 12. Insofar as the scheme restricted the right to marry, it could only be justified to the extent that it operated to prevent marriages of convenience. In fact, the conditions imposed by the scheme had no relevance to whether the marriage was genuine or not. Rather, the scheme operated as a blanket prohibition (subject to the discretion in relation to the exception for especially compassionate features) on all marriages, whether genuine or not. As such, the scheme operated in such a way as to be a disproportionate interference with the right marry. The appeal was dismissed. [RA]