UK government beaten by five-year-old in Supreme Court citizenship case

A child was wrongly denied British nationality after her father successfully appealed against the UK government’s efforts to remove his citizenship, the Supreme Court has ruled.

The complex case involves the five-year-old daughter of a man who at the time of her birth in Bangladesh in 2019 was in the midst of a legal battle to regain his own British citizenship.

The man, known as E3 due to anonymity conditions, is among a number of British nationals from Bangladeshi backgrounds whom the government attempted to strip of their citizenship in the past decade on national security grounds.

They included some people who had travelled to Syria during the country’s civil war, although E3's case is not understood to be Syria-related.

But an immigration appeals court in 2021 ruled that they had been left stateless because the UK government had wrongly assessed that they were entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship.

The Home Office then restored E3’s citizenship, but refused to recognise his daughter’s birthright because it maintained that he was not a British national between the loss of his citizenship in 2017 and 2021.

E3 and another man, known as N3, then launched judicial review proceedings, also brought in the name of the child, known as ZA, to determine what their citizenship status had been during that period.

Their lawyers argued that because the withdrawal of their citizenship was unlawful, they had in fact remained British nationals throughout.

Fundamental right

In 2022, the High Court ruled in favour of the government, noting that ZA was “entirely blameless” but had not been entitled to British citizenship at the time of her birth. That verdict was upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2023.

But in an unanimous judgment on Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled that E3 and N3 had remained British citizens, citing the UK’s obligations under international law, which prohibit rendering a person stateless and “the fundamental right of citizenship”.

'The entire process has left my family and I feeling like we are second-class citizen'

- E3, British citizen

“The consequence of this for ZA is that she is a British citizen by virtue of E3’s status as a British citizen at the time of ZA’s birth,” the judgment said.

Responding to the judgment through his lawyers, Duncan Lewis Solicitors, E3 described the outcome as “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,” he said.

“The entire process has left my family and I feeling like we are second-class citizens.”

Fahad Ansari, who represented the man and his daughter, called on Home Secretary Yvette Cooper to apologise to the family.

“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 five, has had to battle through the highest courts in England to be recognised as British,” Ansari said.

The British government used controversial citizenship-stripping powers against dozens of British nationals who travelled to Syria during the civil war, including a number who remain stranded in camps and prisons in northeast Syria for people suspected of links to the Islamic State (IS) group.

International law prohibits a country from making people stateless but the UK government argued that those it targeted were dual nationals or entitled to another nationality.

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However, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission in 2021 ruled that British nationals with an entitlement to Bangladeshi citizenship would forfeit that right if they had not claimed it by the age of 21, as was the case for both E3 and N3, and therefore had no other claim to citizenship.

Those circumstances do not apply for Shamima Begum, a London-born woman who travelled to IS-controlled territory aged 15 in 2015 and remains in a detention camp in northeast Syria.

In her appeal against the loss of her citizenship, she was found to still have a right to Bangladeshi citizenship because she was deprived of her British citizenship before she was 21.

In a statement, Duncan Lewis Solicitors said the case could have consequences for children born to people stripped of citizenship and left stateless who were now stranded in detention camps in Syria and Iraq, or in refugee camps in Turkey and Lebanon.

“The British government has a duty of care to inform these children and their parents of the impact of this judgment and to take urgent steps to repatriate them,” it said.

The Home Office has been approached for comment.