Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
WE’LL FIGHT ON AFTER IRISH IDENTITY RULING
Couple’s vow as Home Office appeal upheld
A WOMAN who lost a challenge against a Home Office ruling that she is British by birth has vowed to continue her legal battle.
Emma Desouza, from Magherafelt, Co Derry, accused the Government of failing to honour the “spirit of the Good Friday Agreement” that states people from Northern Ireland can identify as British, Irish or both.
Ms Desouza, who insists she is Irish and has never been British, claimed the Home Office’s “hardline” approach was an attempt to restrict access to EU entitlements in Northern Ireland post-brexit.
It won an appeal yesterday against an immigration tribunal case that had originally upheld Ms Desouza’s right to declare herself as Irish without first renouncing British citizenship.
The long-running wrangle centres on her application for a residence card for her Us-born husband Jake Parker.
After the Upper Tribunal ruling, Ms Desouza pledged to take her case to the Belfast Court of Appeal.
She said: “After four years it’s safe to say we won’t be lying down anytime soon. During that time we have had a lot of personal losses – we have lost family members, we have lost time with our families, we have lost opportunities, we have lost the first four years of our marriage, so we are certainly not going to go quietly into the night with this decision.”
In 2015, Ms Desouza made the residence card application identifying herself as an Irish citizen. The Home Office rejected it on the grounds it considered her British.
Officials told her she could either reapply identifying herself as such, or renounce her UK citizenship and reapply as an Irish citizen.
She argued she never considered herself British, so how could she renounce citizenship she never had.
During the stand-off, the Home Office retained her husband’s passport for two years – forcing him to quit a band as he could not tour and preventing him attending his grandmother’s funeral in the US.
Ms Desouza took a legal challenge and won, with a judge at a First Tier Immigration Tribunal ruling in 2017 she was an “Irish national only who has only ever been such”.
The Home Office appealed the decision at an Upper Tribunal hearing earlier this year.
Those judges found in its favour.
Government lawyers argued the British Nationality Act 1981 was the relevant legislation, not law flowing from the GFA.
They highlighted the provisions on citizenship outlined in the document, which was struck between Stormont parties and the UK and Irish governments, had not been incorporated into the corresponding piece of domestic legislation linked to 1998 Northern Ireland Act peace treaty.
The Government said the British Nationality Act ruled anyone born in the province was automatically such until such time as they renounce that citizenship.
Yesterday, Ms Desouza said her case will have implications for EU citizens post-brexit.
She added: “You have to wonder if this hard-line approach from the British Government is so they can find a way to remove and restrict access to EU rights and entitlements in Northern Ireland.
“No doubt it is complicated to deal with the fact there are 1.8 million people with the birth right to Irish citizenship and, through that, EU rights.
BELFAST YESTERDAY