Siân Pearce – Postgrad Researcher & Immigration Lawyer
This week there were some short, but very important changes to the Home Office guidance on how applications for British Citizenship are decided. These were brought to the public attention by the excellent Free Movement blog. The guidance now includes ‘illegal entry’ as a specific reason for considering an applicant to not be of good character and therefore ineligible for British Citizenship. It also states that anyone who made a ‘dangerous journey’ should normally be ineligible for British Citizenship. This replaces the citizenship ban in the Illegal Migration Act 2023, while neatly avoiding pesky parliamentary scrutiny. Whilst not wanting to go down the path of suggesting particular ‘carve outs’ for children in a policy that is an exercise in performative cruelty that clearly breaches the 1951 Refugee Convention. I would like to consider the impact of this policy on children.
The guidance applies to applications made from 10 of February 2025 onwards. For most refugees the route to Citizenship takes a minimum of 6 years – 5 years with leave to remain as a refugee, and a further year holding indefinite leave to remain. Therefore this policy impacts those who arrived in 2019 and probably much earlier as, given the exorbitant fees attached to citizenship it is likely that many will wait longer to save the money needed.
Whilst some sections of the guidance indicate that discretion may be exercised in the case of children who were deemed to have not chosen their manner of entry (the example given is children arriving with family, suggesting this does not apply to unaccompanied children), and much has been made of an ‘exemption’ for children, this should be treated with a great deal of caution. The policy does not give an exemption but indicates where caseworker discretion may be exercised – the example given being children who arrived with their parents. Those who arrived as unaccompanied children will find themselves in the position of attempting to explain why they really had ‘no choice’ in making the journey to the UK. Much more likely is that people will simply not risk the £1630 fee.
Article 7 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that children have a right to a nationality. Of course, most refugee children would not be considered ‘stateless’ in a technical sense. They have a nationality; however, the granting of refugee status confirms that the state of their nationality is unable or unwilling to offer protection from persecution. This status is dependant on the recipient not ‘re-availing’ themselves of the protection of the state of their nationality – including the act of applying for a passport. Thus, without the option to apply for citizenship of their host country they remain in limbo – reliant on refugee travel documents, which in many cases subject them to far stricter visa requirements than a British Passport. For this reason, I would suggest that the change is not only in breach of the Refugee Convention, but the Convention on the Rights of the Child also.
However, citizenship is more than a passport, it is about social cohesion. Citizenship has been used to denote who does and, more importantly, does not, belong in Britain since the 1940s.[1] There is evidence that suggests that access to citizenship supports economic and social integration. Boys and young men who face the ‘double disadvantage’ of being both racialised and care experienced are far more likely to enter the criminal justice and mental health systems.[2] Those who are without British Citizenship may then face the additional penalty of deportation.
However, this should not be a debate about deportation (though that is certainly a debate to be had). But rather the question must be why children, and those who arrived as children some time in previous decades could be barred from this important and basic part of belonging to society in the first place.
[1] Kennetta Hammond Perry, London Is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press 2016).
[2] Laura Robertson, John Peter Wainwright and this link will open in a new window Link to external site, ‘Black Boys’ and Young Men’s Experiences with Criminal Justice and Desistance in England and Wales: A Literature Review’ (2020) 4 Genealogy 50.