Duncan Lewis Solicitors challenge discriminatory refusal of citizenship under the Windrush Scheme (27 August 2020)

On 20 August 2020, Duncan Lewis Solicitors applied for permission for judicial review of the Home Secretary’s decision to refuse the citizenship application of a woman from the Windrush generation. The Claimant’s case is that the Home Secretary’s reliance on Schedule 1 of the British Nationality Act 1981 (BNA) is indirectly discriminatory and amounts to a violation of the Claimant’s rights under Articles 8 and 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

Duncan Lewis’ client is a member of the Windrush generation. She moved to the UK with her parents as a baby in the 1960s and lived in the UK for most of her youth. In 1984 she moved to the US for two years. In 1986 she was informed by the British embassy in New York that her right to indefinite leave to remain had lapsed because she had been out of the country for more than two years. Unable to return the UK, she lived in the US and Ghana until 2018, nearly 32 years after she was wrongfully refused re-entry.

In 2018 she was granted a visitor’s visa and subsequently received indefinite leave to remain under the Windrush Scheme. Nevertheless her citizenship application under the same Scheme was refused in 2019. The Home Secretary relied on paragraph 1(2)(a) of Schedule 1 to the British Nationality Act 1981 and held that our client was required to live in the UK for 5 consecutive years before making a citizenship application.

The Claimant’s case is that the decision to refuse her citizenship application was a breach of her right to private and family life, and that she has been discriminated against by being treated in the same way as anyone else with indefinite leave to remain, when her situation is materially different, given the historic injustice she has faced. In the circumstances, the Home Secretary should have read into the BNA a discretion to waive the five year residency requirement. She was in breach of her duty under Section 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998 by failing to do so.

The team awaits a decision from the High Court on permission and encourages any individuals in similar situations to contact them as soon as possible.


Representation

The legal team at Duncan Lewis is made up of Toufique Hossain, Jeremy Bloom, Nina Kamp. They have instructed Grace Brown of Garden Court Chambers.