My Lords, as a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, I agree with the noble Baroness that we have done good work on the Bill. On a more serious note, perhaps I may say how much we appreciate the chairmanship of the right honourable Harriet Harman MP, whose recent bereavement has saddened us so much.
I will speak to both Amendments 30 and 31. As has been said by other noble Lords, Clause 10 amends the British Nationality Act to introduce new requirements for the registration of a stateless child—a child born in the UK—and could make it even more difficult for them to acquire British nationality, to which there are already significant hurdles. I could not agree more with the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. Why should it be a problem that children are becoming stateless and ceasing to have the security of nationality?
Under Clause 10, the Home Secretary has to be satisfied that the child is unable to acquire another nationality. That puts that child in the position of having to prove that they could not reasonably have acquired another nationality. The policy rationale seems to be a suspicion that parents are wilfully causing their child’s statelessness—the culture of disbelief that the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, referred to. As colleagues and the JCHR say, it is difficult to see how the best interests of the child, as required by the 1961 UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, are served by the new test in this provision. How is it in that child’s interests to be left stateless?
Indeed, asserts the JCHR, Clause 10
“risks punishing the child for a perceived failure”
on the part of their parent or carer, which is obviously through no fault of their own. However, the UN convention does not impose a requirement on the parent to exhaust all avenues to seek the citizenship of another state. So Clause 10 could move the UK away from the convention. I was interested that the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, quoted ILFA and the Bar Council as saying that they do indeed think that this is a contravention of the convention, and I can see why. Amendment 30 is an attempt to move the UK back towards the intention of the convention by saying that British citizenship could only be withheld
“where the nationality of a parent is available to the child immediately, without any legal or administrative hurdles.”
Amendment 31 aims to make the best interests of the child central to the decision-making.
Finally, in addition to the risk of alienation from our society of individual children, it cannot be in the interests of British society as a whole for young people born here to be excluded from sharing citizenship and thus rootedness in their community.