Immigration: UK Citizenship and Nationality

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Avebury (LD)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Roberts has a proud record of supporting the rights of people who are entitled to British citizenship. I am grateful to him for this opportunity to talk about citizenship. He has seen the Long Title of the forthcoming Immigration Bill, but he cannot tell me whether it contains anything about citizenship. I understand that it does not, and that after several years in which there have been no Bills to revise citizenship, we are again not to be given an opportunity in this Session.

There are some residual problems left over from measures agreed by Parliament in 2002 onwards to equalise the transmission of citizenship between fathers and mothers, with which we have dealt before. Citizenship is automatic for children of a British father, but it requires registration while the child is a minor when it is the mother who is British. If the mother forgets or dies, the right is forfeited. This could be rectified by providing that, where the mother has not registered the child during the child’s minority, she has the right to register herself on attaining her majority.

Another example was given by Wesley Gryk solicitors. It concerns a client, Mr A, who was born in Bermuda in the 1950s to a mother who was then a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies. She became a British Overseas Territories citizen on 1 January 1983 by virtue of Section 23(1) of the British Nationality Act 1981 and a British citizen by virtue of Section 3(1) of the British Overseas Territories Act 2002. The Home Office says:

“There is no registration option for people who would have become British Overseas citizens or British Dependent Territories citizens on 1 January 1983 if women had been able to pass on citizenship before that date and who, as a result, might now have had entitlements to British citizenship under other provisions”.

However, Mr A’s cousins, the children of his mother’s brothers and similarly born outside the UK, are now British citizens. That is a clear case of gender discrimination in the operation of British nationality law and ought to be corrected.

Another anomaly that has been raised several times is the status of the Chagos islanders. If they had not been kicked out of their homeland by our Government in the late 1960s, their descendants would by now have become British citizens. Descendants born here are still British, but those born overseas, mainly in Mauritius, are not. In some cases, a member of the family who is British may come here, but can only bring in members of his family if he can demonstrate that the dependents will have no recourse to public funds immediately on arrival. This results in split families and in British citizens being permanently exiled because they cannot or will not leave their families.

The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association proposes that Chagos islanders born in exile should be able to register as British citizens if they have a single parent, man or woman, who was born on the islands. The same right should be extended to children of those who registered as British citizens under Section 6(1) of the British Overseas Territories Act 2002.

There is the whole question of stateless persons, for whom the UK restated her commitment to the 1961 convention at the 50th anniversary UN event in Geneva in December 2011. However, a British citizen born outside the UK and British Overseas Territories is British by descent and therefore unable to transmit his or her citizenship to the next generation or bring the children to the UK without surmounting major obstacles. In addition, there are the children of people living in a foreign country who acquire British citizenship after the birth of their children, where the state of residence prohibits the acquisition of its nationality to the children, often on racially discriminatory grounds, so the children are then stateless.

Finally, I need to mention the British overseas citizens who renounced their Malaysian citizenship when advised falsely by solicitors that they could then claim full British citizenship. After they found this was wrong, they languished here stateless, destitute and without the right to work for many years. After much correspondence and many meetings with the Minister for Immigration, he said that he had negotiated an agreement with the Malaysians for these people to return there and reclaim their former Malaysian status. When pressed for details, the Minister wrote yesterday saying that the persons concerned will be allowed a five-year residence pass to return to Malaysia, and that at the end of that period they could apply for permanent residence. However, he did not say how much longer they would have to continue stateless or explain what conditions they would have to satisfy before they could regain their original citizenship. The Minister says that he will publicise the arrangements only after at least a couple of successful returnees have demonstrated that the process is running smoothly, but even if that happens, I imagine that most of the people concerned would sooner have another five years of statelessness here in this country than return to Malaysia and face a 10-year period of statelessness there.