Tribunal tells Gurkha veteran's daughter her family life with her parents 'ended' when she married in 2007, as she is DENIED asylum in UK

Published 30 October 2026, 12:42

• Regular cash transfers from her UK-based parents began only in the month she applied to join them, the Upper Tribunal noted.
• Nepali mother Yanu Maya Gurung, whose husband left for South Korea, said she 'will not survive' without her parents' money.
• Both her children, Alex and Abiya, lose their bids too because their cases depended entirely on hers.

A Nepali woman abandoned by her husband has lost her bid to join her Gurkha veteran father in the UK after a tribunal ruled that her family life with her parents legally ended when she married in 2007 — a finding that also sank her two children's cases.

Yanu Maya Gurung, her son Alex and her daughter Abiya applied in February 2024 for entry clearance to join her father, Krishna Bahadur Gurung, who was discharged from the Gurkhas in 2003 and settled in the UK in 2012 alongside his wife and two sons, leaving Yanu Maya behind in Nepal.

The Upper Tribunal dismissed all three appeals in October 2026, according to the ruling.

Yanu Maya's husband had moved to South Korea for work in 2016, his financial support gradually dried up and then stopped entirely.

He returned briefly to Nepal in late 2018 and early 2019 — when Abiya was conceived — before the couple separated in 2019 and divorced in 2023.

The family argued that his abandonment had left Yanu Maya financially and emotionally dependent on her UK-based parents.

The Home Office refused the applications in April 2024, principally because Krishna Bahadur was not discharged before the qualifying date of 1 July 1997, and because the family and sponsor had been living apart for more than two years.

A First-tier Tribunal judge dismissed the appeals in February 2026, finding that "the harsh truth is that any Article 8 family life which existed between the [first] appellant and her ex-Gurkha soldier parent ended in 2007 when the [first] appellant embarked upon her own independent adult life."

The judge further found that recent financial contributions were "not sufficient to establish anything more than the normal emotional ties between independent adult family members."

In her witness statement of 14 November 2024, Yanu Maya said she had never lived independently and acknowledged that her beauty parlour work had not made her financially self-sufficient, adding that without her parents' financial support she "will not survive."

The Upper Tribunal acknowledged that evidence but found it insufficient to overturn the lower judge's conclusions.

Critical to the tribunal's reasoning was the pattern of money transfers from the UK.

The ruling noted that regular monthly payments began only in February 2024 — the same month the family applied for entry clearance — while before that date the evidence showed only two transfers in 2020, two in 2021, two in 2022 and four in 2023.

The tribunal found the judge was "reasonably entitled to conclude that there were significant gaps in the evidence of financial support."

The Upper Tribunal also rejected the argument that the judge had ignored whether family life could be rebuilt after the marriage collapsed, and noted that the Court of Appeal in Entry Clearance Officer v FA [2026] EWCA Civ 1014 had found no family life in a case it considered to involve "more compelling facts than the present one."

Alex and Abiya's appeals depended entirely on their mother succeeding, and the tribunal ruled their cases "stand or fall" with hers.

Separately, the tribunal discharged an anonymity order the First-tier judge had imposed on the children without any application being made, ruling that "the mere fact that two of the appellants are children is not, without more, sufficient to justify the making of an anonymity order."