Amanda Weston KC and Ali Bandegani, of the Garden Court Chambers Public Law Team, acted for JCWI in the Appeal.
The Supreme Court has ruled that a child born to a parent deprived of their British citizenship, pending an ultimately successful appeal against deprivation, acquired British citizenship at birth.
ZA’s parent E3 was deprived of British citizenship under s 40 British Nationality Act 1981 when the Home Secretary served notice of the decision and signed a deprivation order. E3 appealed and succeeded on the basis that the order had made them stateless which is prohibited under the Act.
ZA was born while the deprivation order was valid pending appeal. The Home Secretary asserted that ZA was not British and that the statutory scheme did not allow for a remedy where she was satisfied that the deprivation order was lawful at the time she made it.
ZA commenced judicial review proceedings claiming that the child is indeed British by operation of law and that the consequence of the successful appeal was that the deprivation order was (and always had been) ineffective in law.
Taking an approach of nuanced reasoning from the Supreme Court’s previous judgment in Majera [2021] UKSC 46, that unlawful administrative decisions may be void for some purposes but not for others, the Supreme Court held that neither the Appellant nor the Respondent was correct but that Parliament’s intention was a ‘middle way’. It held that the Home Secretary is permitted under the statutory scheme to detain, deport and exclude a deprived person pending an appeal – but not to make them stateless.
This judgment clarifies the effect of a successful deprivation appeal and protects the citizenship rights of vulnerable children at great risk of harm who Parliament clearly never intended should be fixed with the consequences of national security measures wrongly taken against their parents.
Amanda Weston KC, who acted for JCWI and also for the Appellant in Majera, stated (reproduced from the JCWI press release):
“This is an important judgment protecting the citizenship rights of British children whose safety and futures are put at risk by matters wholly outside their control. The Crown has important duties to protect children known as ‘parens patriae’, which extend to British children abroad at risk of harm and this judgment ensures that vulnerable British children who would otherwise be denied the protection of the Crown and the rights which attach to British citizenship, are not wrongly excluded from it.”
