Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

moved Amendment No. 67:"After Clause 55, insert the following new clause—" ““AMENDMENT OF SECTION 4C OF BRITISH NATIONALITY ACT 1981    After section 4C(4) of the British Nationality Act 1981 (c. 61) (acquisition by registration: certain persons born between 1961 and 1983) insert— ““(5)   An applicant is also entitled to be registered as a British citizen if he or she is the brother or the sister of any person who satisfies the three conditions set out in subsections (2) to (4).”””” The noble Lord said: My Lords, the British Nationality Act 1981 equalised the right of a child born overseas to parents, one of whom was British, whether that parent was the mother or the father. In either case, the child, born after 7 February 1961, could be registered as a British citizen by the parents up to the age of 18, but if the mother was British and the father was foreign they could not do so. That position was corrected in the 2002 Act. We argued that there was still discrimination, in that if the child’s right was derived from his father, he could be registered as a British citizen because of his ancestral connection, irrespective of whether it was done on his behalf by his parents when he was a minor, or by himself as an adult. In the 2002 Bill Committee stage the Government accepted the case in principle, tabling their own amendment on Report, which is now Section 4C of the British Nationality Act 1981. The problem with that solution was the cut-off date, which led to a situation where children born after 7 February 1961 were entitled to British citizenship, while children born before that date had no rights. There are several cases where siblings in the same family are divided in that way into sheep and goats. For instance, Michael Turberville, who has given me permission to quote his case, and who is the chairman of CAMPAIGNS, the NGO that promotes the rights of the 1981 Act orphans—so to speak—now has British citizenship because he was born in 1967, but none of his elder brothers and sisters qualified: David, born in 1945; Freda, born in 1946; Sandra, born in 1949; Maryann, born in 1952, and Philip, born in 1957. Mr Turberville says that about 150 members of his organisation are excluded from British citizenship by the cut-off date. One mother whose family is affected, Mrs Constance Salgado, who lives in Colombia, had children on either side of the cut-off date and is seeking to formulate a complaint against the UK under the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. But the Government, knowing that they would otherwise have been in breach of an international obligation, entered a reservation to CEDAW allowing them to discriminate in nationality law. The only reason that was given by the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, for turning down the proposal the last time that I raised it was:"““One can only go so far back in seeking to right the wrongs of history and of previous generations””.—[Official Report, 31/10/02; col. 298.]" To remove discrimination in our nationality law that affects only a small number of people still alive and nobody from any previous generation is surely something that any listening Minister should accept. This Minister went a little further than the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, when she explained in a discussion that we had that—I am paraphrasing what she said—although it is agreed that very few children born abroad to British mothers and foreign fathers would benefit from the removal of the cut-off date and therefore it would have no implications for immigration policy, there could be repercussions in the drafting rules that apply to all statutes. My first reaction was that we could achieve the same end result without tampering with the time limit through the formulation in the first of the amendments. Then I realised that in many cases all the children in the family could have been born before the cut-off date, and the purpose of the second amendment is to move the date back so that all but the very old would be covered. Mr Turberville tells me that all the members of his CAMPAIGNS group would be included if the cut-off date was moved, as I suggest, back to 1931. Common sense tells us that most of the children born between 1931 and 1961 who would be able to register under the amendment would not bother, since they have held another citizenship for the past 44 years. However small the number affected, this is worth doing to eliminate what I hope is the only remaining piece of sex discrimination in our nationality law and to enable us to rescind our reservation to the CEDAW and its optional protocol. I beg to move.