Court of Appeal upholds decision to refuse extension of time to woman deprived of British citizenship

The Court of Appeal has held that the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) was entitled to decide that it would not be unjust to refuse to allow a woman in a refugee camp in Syria to lodge a late appeal against the Home Office’s decision depriving her of her British citizenship.

The case is F4 v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025] EWCA Civ 291.

The time limit for appealing may be extended where it would be unjust not to do so. As noted by the Court of Appeal, this is a high hurdle. Hardship to the appellant is not enough. Any hardship needs to be set against “the important general principle of legal certainty and the desirability of ensuring compliance with rules of procedure” (at [16]).

This case demonstrates the importance of lodging an appeal in time and the difficulties that can be faced when this is not done.

F4’s circumstances

The appellant in this case, anonymised as F4, lived in the UK with her mother until she was 17. In around 2013, she left the UK for Syria where she married a man who went on to physically and verbally abuse her. She had two children with this man: a son who was born in 2016; and a daughter who died when she was only a few months old in around 2019. Shortly after the death of her daughter, F4 fled ISIS territory with her son. She currently lives in a refugee camp in Syria with her son.

On 20 December 2019 the Home Office decided to deprive F4 of her British citizenship. This did not affect her son’s status. Although it is not explicitly mentioned in the Court of Appeal’s decision, he is presumably a British citizen by descent. The decision to deprive F4 of her citizenship was served to file i.e. it was not sent to F4.

The practice of serving to file – although lawful due to section 10 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 – is incredibly unfair. However, this was of limited significance in F4’s case as she was told about the decision by her mother before the appeal deadline had passed.

She also received a letter from the charity Reprieve explaining the decision, highlighting the deadline for appealing, and warning that it would be “very very hard (maybe impossible)” to appeal later. This letter was described as “a model of clarity and simplicity” (at [42]).

F4 sent several VoiceNotes to her mother indicating that she did not want to appeal.

The subsequent appeal to SIAC

An appeal was lodged with SIAC on 24 August 2022 following F4’s decision, made in June 2022, that she wanted to appeal against the decision to deprive her of her citizenship.

What happened between December 2019 and August 2022? Did F4 change her mind or was her state of mind in December 2019 such that she should not be taken to have made a decision at all?

This was the question at the heart of this case.

SIAC decided that F4 had changed her mind and refused to extend the time limit for appealing. This decision was upheld by the Court of Appeal.

F4’s initial reluctance to appeal appears to have stemmed from “…a ‘deep-seated misapprehension’ about the consequences of an appeal for her and for her child. She was afraid that the British Government would take her child away by force” (at [32]). It took time for her to be reassured that that would not happen.   

However, SIAC was not willing to accept her claim that she was incapable of making a decision before the deadline for lodging an appeal. It held that:

To accept that later material [relating to her state of mind] would require a conclusion that although the VoiceNote strongly suggested that she had read the Reprieve letter, she was ‘not certain’ that her citizenship had been taken from her. Even though her state of mind then ‘may have been very sub-optimal’ it was ‘difficult to understand why, if she was in doubt, she did not express that to her mother and cousin in the messages. Instead, and in marked contrast, the messages exhibit a degree of frustration which a young person may often feel towards a parent who is, in their eyes, badgering them to do something they have decided not to do’ (at [44])

SIAC did not decide what the reason for F4’s failure to appeal actually was. This formed the basis for the first ground to the Court of Appeal. A second ground alleged that SIAC was wrong to decide that an explanation which is objectively unreasonable cannot justify the exercise of its discretion to extend time. The third ground of appeal related to SIAC’s treatment of the expert psychological evidence.

The Court of Appeal’s decision

In relation to the first ground, it was argued on F4’s behalf that there were three possible reasons for the delay:   

The first was ‘brain fog’: she could not understand that her citizenship had been removed. The second, which emerged from the evidence of Professor Patel [who provided expert evidence eon F4’s psychological condition], was that she was ‘frozen’ or ‘overwhelmed’: she understood what she needed to do, but could not do it. The third explanation was that she was afraid that if she appealed, her son would be removed. (at [80]).

SIAC did not accept the first two reasons and, in relation to the third reason, decided that it was “plainly entirely unreasonable for F4 to maintain that stance” (at [52]).

The Court of Appeal decided that SIAC was not obliged to make a finding about F4’s real reason for not appealing earlier:

SIAC analysed the evidence carefully. It was entitled to decide that F4 knew all that she needed to know in order to appeal in time and had made a conscious decision not to appeal… SIAC was not obliged to go further and to make a finding about F4’s real reason for not appealing until June 2022. (at [86]).

In relation to the second ground of appeal, the Court of Appeal held that SIAC had not decided that, because F4 had acted unreasonably, it could not extend the time for the appeal. Rather, there was no explanation for the delay at all. She had deliberately made an informed choice not to appeal. As such, the question of whether any explanation was reasonable or satisfactory did not arise.

In relation to the third ground, the Court of Appeal did not accept that SIAC had reached a conclusion on F4’s credibility and then considered whether this conclusion could be displaced by the expert evidence. SIAC did not look at the evidence in rigid and separate boxes. It considered all the evidence in the round, and reached a balanced conclusion on it.

The appeal was therefore dismissed.