The Court of Appeal has upheld a decision made the Home Secretary to deprive a person of their British citizenship on the basis that it was obtained by dishonest concealment of a material fact. Namely, that the appellant did not disclose what appeared ...

Can a judge ignore part of a Home Office decision if their representative doesn’t mention it in court? No, said the Court of Appeal in Shyti v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2023] EWCA Civ 770. The case The appellant, Mr Shyti, was chal ...

The British Nationality (Regularisation of Past Practice) Act 2023 came into force on 29 June 2023. It inserts a new section 50B into the British Nationality Act 1981. Section 50B definitively and retrospectively confirms the British nationality statu ...

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the disembarking of the passengers on board the ship the HMT Empire Windrush at Tilbury docks on 22 June 1948. Even now, five years after the Windrush scandal broke, many well-informed and well-intentioned journalis ...

The Upper Tribunal has given guidance on the correct approach in deprivation appeals. The headnote to this case, Chimi (deprivation appeals; scope and evidence) Cameroon [2023] UKUT 00115 (IAC), says: Background Ms Chimi was born in September 1977 in ...

We live in what some have called ‘multi-status Britain’, a country in which discrimination is baked into a social, economic and racial hierarchy based on different forms of legal status. With British citizenship, other forms of British nat ...

An important update confirms British citizenship rights for people born to EU citizens between 1 January 1983 and 1 October 2000 following a change in the Home Office’s position on how British nationality law applies to them. The change was firs ...

In a colourfully-worded and expressive judgment, the High Court has found that challenges to the Home Secretary’s decision to refuse citizenship naturalisation applications can only be challenged on grounds of irrationality. The judgment is R (Sandy ...

Shamima Begum has lost the latest round in her legal battle against the decision to strip her of her British citizenship and exile her abroad. The Special Immigration Appeals Commission that heard her case concluded that she was a victim of traffickin ...

If you want to learn about the history if nationality and immigration law, there are few options available to you. Even if you have access to a really good library, Ann Dummett and Andy Nichol’s classic Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others date ...

In this blog post I am going to take a look at the second main way that the British state strips some citizens of their citizenship status. In a previous blog post I looked at behaviour-based denaturalisation. Here I’m looking at fraud-based den ...

The power to denaturalise a British subject on the basis of their behaviour was first introduced by legislation in 1918. With some adjustments, the power remained broadly the same until as late as 2002. Essentially, only a person who had naturalised a ...

In a judgment handed down last Friday, the High Court has cast doubt on the British citizenship status of children born in the United Kingdom before 2 October 2000 to EU citizens who did not at that time possess indefinite leave to remain. The case is ...

On 14 October 2022 the Home Office released a second iteration of their caseworker guidance for handling applications to register as a British citizen in special circumstances (section 4L, inserted by the Nationality Act Borders Act 2022). The casewor ...

The Home Office has launched a new application process for people of Chagossian descent to obtain British citizenship or British overseas territories citizenship. The introduction of this route is certainly welcome. Whilst the Chagossians are still fi ...

Hubert Howard arrived in the United Kingdom in 1960, aged four. He was a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies back then and was fully entitled to enter the country of his nationality. The law changed around him over the years but he carried on w ...

A raft of changes to nationality law came into force a few weeks ago. I covered the changes at a high level on my own firm’s website (shameless plug), but wanted to write in more depth about the new section 4L, which opens up tantalising possibi ...

On 1 July 1962, sixty years ago today, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 came into effect. It is hard to overstate the importance of this landmark legislation. Aliens were already subject to a separate, full system of immigration control under the ...

Families who can’t afford British citizenship for their children can now get it for free. A new “citizenship fee waiver for individuals under 18” policy was published today. It allows under-18s to apply to have the £1,012 fee on app ...

When the Home Office withdraws a decision to deprive someone of their British citizenship, does the person get their citizenship back (prospective) or was it never lost in the first place (retroactive)? This was the deceptively simple question that th ...

Deciding whether someone is of good character in the context of a citizenship application is up to the Home Office. Getting that decision overturned in the courts is likely to be very difficult. This is what we learn from the Court of Appeal’s decis ...

When the Nationality and Borders Bill returns to the House of Lords later today, it will contain a registration provision allowing direct descendants of those born on the Chagos Islands to become British nationals. The Chagossians will be entitled to ...

Is the Home Office under a duty to provide information establishing a child’s nationality? This is the question considered by the Inner House of the Court of Session in AS v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2022] CSIH 16. Unfortunately, t ...

A mother of three British children has lost her appeal against the decision of Amber Rudd to take away her British citizenship in 2017. The judgment of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) makes for very grim reading.  The woman, anonym ...

Regular readers will remember the problems caused by Comprehensive Sickness Insurance, or CSI. Essentially, certain EU citizens in the UK pre-Brexit were expected to have private health insurance. If they didn’t, it can still cause them legal pr ...

The Supreme Court has dismissed a challenge to the level at which the government has set the fees for children to register as British citizens. The court held that the government has been authorised by Parliament to set the level of the fees as it cho ...

The UK government’s attempt to strip a British-Pakistani woman of her citizenship without telling her was unlawful, a split Court of Appeal has confirmed. Lord Justice Baker and Lady Justice Whipple held that the regulation allowing notice of ci ...

The Upper Tribunal has affirmed the continuing obligation to disclose material facts in applications for naturalisation as a British citizen, including facts which arise after submitting the application. The case is Walile (deprivation: self-incrimina ...

At least 464 people have been stripped of their British citizenship since the law allowing it was relaxed 15 years ago, Free Movement analysis shows. Home Office figures record 175 people being deprived of their citizenship on national security ground ...

Two victims of the Windrush scandal have won a High Court challenge arguing for citizenship law to be applied more leniently in special cases like theirs. Mr Justice Bourne held today that a seemingly inflexible provision of British nationality law re ...

Secretary of State for the Home Department v P3 [2021] EWCA Civ 1642 is about how much SIAC should defer to the Home Secretary’s view about national security concerns. The answer is quite a lot, but not too much. The background to this case is t ...

The Home Secretary can take away anyone’s British citizenship when it would be “conducive to the public good” but would not make that person stateless. She can also take away naturalised citizenship if obtained by fraud, false representa ...