Hi! Me and my girlfriend have been in a long distance relationship since february of 2012 applied for a Partnership-based temporary visa late last year. We submitted every evidence that we have including messages from 2012 to present, travel itineraries and reservations, pictures whenever we are together, skype calls, social media posts, support letters from our friends, relationship timeline, remittances forms, mails/letters/gifts sent to each other and relationship timeline. But since we haven’t lived together yet, our case officer suggested that we convert the visa from partnership-based to general visitor visa, we complied and my visa application got approved in a week.
So she came here to New Zealand this January and we explore Christchurch, Queenstown, Dunedin and Oamaru. And then after a month, we decided to lodge a Work visa based on Partnership since we thought that every evidences that we submitted from my previous visa application is already on-record, we submitted all the evidences we collected since i lived with my partner here in new zealand such as pictures, joint account, individual account statement.. But after a month and a half we received an email from our officer that my application may be denied and we had to submit more evidences. We are living in a flat so we figured that may be the problem so we asked our friends for letters of support. We also included the the tenancy agreement, letter from our landlord, first electricity bill in our flat that’s under our name and re-submitted every evidence from the start of our relationship and added some more pictures including events we attended as couple but after a week we received a mail stating that my application has been declined. Based on their letter the reasons are:
- Immigration instruction E4.5.5(c) states that a partner may only be granted a temporary entry class visa if they are living together with their partner in a genuine and stable partnership.
- Immigration instruction E4.5.5(d) states that in each case the onus of proving that a partnership is genuine and stable lies with the couple involved.
I have lots of friends who did the same way(sponsored a tourist visa and applied for work visa based on partnership after a month of their partner's arrival date). Are they doubting our relationship is not genuine? Any tips what else could we do? We are now preparing to submit a reconsideration letter. We need some advice on how to do this. Do have to re-submit every evidences(from start of our relationship or from the day she arrived here?) that we collected? Thanks