Supreme Court: UK unlawfully denied child citizenship after parent’s wrongful deprivation

London - The Supreme Court has today ruled that the UK government’s ongoing refusal to recognise a young girl - whose father had been unlawfully deprived of his citizenship - as British to be unlawful. The girl ZA was born during a period when her father E3 had been left stateless by the Home Secretary. 

Although E3 later won his appeal, the Home Secretary argued that he had been unable to pass his citizenship to his daughter as she was born before E3’s citizenship was reinstated. The Supreme Court overruled the earlier decisions of the Court of Appeal and the High Court and found that where SIAC has allowed an appeal on statelessness grounds, the deprivation order should be treated as having no effect from the outset; there is no need to wait for the Home Secretary to withdraw the order or to reinstate citizenship. It takes immediate effect.

The court ruled that a second man, N3, who had similarly been rendered stateless by the Home Secretary between 2017 and 2020, was also a British citizen throughout the process. 

The ruling will impact any children born to parents after they were unlawfully stripped of their citizenship on statelessness grounds. CAGE International is aware of a number of such children in Turkey and in the detention camps in Syria and Iraq. The British government has a duty of care towards these children and CAGE International expects it to inform their parents of the decision. 

CAGE International has campaigned for both E3 and N3 over the years, culminating in today's positive ruling for them both. 

E3, father of ZA said:

“While I welcome the court’s decision, it is bittersweet. I have lost out on the critical years of my daughter’s childhood and am still unable to fathom how it took the intervention of the most senior judges in the country to determine what was a matter of simple common sense. The entire process has left my family and I feeling like we are second class citizens. I am very grateful to my legal team who have been fighting for my rights since 2017.”

Fahad Ansari, solicitor for the Appellant, said:

“I am incredibly pleased for my client who can finally be reunited with her father after many years of forcible separation due to the stubbornness of the Home Secretary. It is astonishing that the government put up such a rigorous struggle over the fundamental rights of an ‘entirely blameless’ child who, at the tender age of 5, has had to battle through the highest courts in England to be recognised as British. I hope that the Home Secretary can be humble enough to finally admit her error of judgement in resisting this challenge and issue a long overdue apology to this young girl and her family.”

Anas Mustapha, Head of Public Advocacy at CAGE International said:

“While the ruling is a welcome one, it is somewhat of an anomaly as courts have consistently upheld the national security decisions of the Home Office, solidifying a racist two-tier citizenship system of denial and deprivation. During this period, children like ZA have been stranded in foreign jurisdictions, forcibly separated from their parents. Today’s ruling will however, do little to protect against the increasingly authoritarian executive power to deprive British nationals of foreign ancestry.”

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