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1. Imagine a situation where the state has misunderstood its own nationality laws for 20 years. That state has either wrongly issued passports to tens of thousands of people and will now have to take them back. Or has wrongly denied citizenship to tens of thousands of others.
2. Inevitably, it is the British state we're talking about. Those affected are children of EU citizens where the parent from whom British citizenship was derived did not have formal settled status. Children who can claim British citizenship from another parent are not affected.
3. Before 2 October 2000, the Home Office thought that all EU citizens living and working in the UK were "settled" for the purposes of British nationality law, therefore their children born in the UK after 1/1/83 were British.
4. The Home Office changed its mind with effect from 2 October 2000 and decided that EU citizens needed to have been granted indefinite leave to remain to be "settled". But the law had not changed, the Home Office just changed its interpretation of the law.
5. The High Court has found that the Home Office couldn't be right both before 2 October 2000 and after. Either those born between 1/1/83 and 31/12/20 were all not British or they all were British, irrespective of whether the parent had formal settled status.
6. The court decided that they were all not British. The Home Office had been wrongly recognising as British the affected children born before 2/10/00. Their status is now unclear. There may be an appeal, so this may not be the final word.
7. If the outcome stays the same, logic suggests they aren't in truth British citizens even though they may have been issued with passports. Passports are evidence of nationality, they don't confer it. Passports can be (and are) wrongly issued and then have to be withdrawn.
8. If the outcome is reversed (the Home Office was right before 2/10/00 and wrong after) then tens of thousands of children of EU citizens born since then were wrongly charged registration fees or denied citizenship. The parents would not have needed ILR or permanent residence.
9. My write up here. I'm not sure I've explained it clearly in this thread or in the blog post. It's a really complicated issue. But it looks like a monumental, epic screw up by the Home Office, which has simply buried its head in the sand for years.
https://freemovement.org.uk/high-court- ... -citizens/
To be clear what this will mean, if it goes through. Anyone born in the UK to two EU citizen parents between 1983 and 2020, will be stripped of their British citizenship (because their parents would've been very unlikely to have ILR when they were born, as their parents would've been using free movement to come to the UK and not subject to visa control, IRL would be a pointless thing for them to get). What this will mean is potentially thousands of people in their adulthood who have only ever lived in the UK, will suddenly find themselves unable to work, unable to access benefits or the NHS, stateless, applying for non-UK citizenship (they may or may not qualify for), and having to prove they've lived in the UK for the past 5 years (that essentially depends on Home Office discretion regardless what evidence is provided) to acquire ILR in their new non-UK passport. The lead times on all those processes (potentially years), will simply mean some people without strong family/friend connections they can rely on (potentially for years) end up on the street or dead ... and I'm not exaggerating.
Immigration/citizenship law needs urgent attention in the UK, and not in the way Tory Home Secretaries bang on about. No one in the system (courts/Home Office/experts) really knows how it works and interpretation changes often, a total mess.
