A man who moved to the UK from Jamaica as a four year-old, became involved in serious crime as a teenager and was convicted of manslaughter at the age of 23, has won a legal challenge against deportation.
The Supreme Court, in Johnson v Home Secretary [2016] UKSC 56, also made a declaration that the “good character” requirement for citizenship is incompatible with Convention rights.
Lady Hale said: “It is not reasonable to impose the additional hurdle of a good character test upon persons who would, but for their parents’ marital status, have automatically acquired citizenship at birth, as this produces the discriminatory result that a person will be deprived of citizenship status because of an accident of birth which is no fault of his.”
The man, Mr Johnson, missed out on gaining British citizenship because his British father and Jamaican mother did not marry. He would have been a British citizen if they had wed, if his mother rather than his father had been British, or if he or his father had made an application while he was a child or, after the age of 16, of good character.
The Home Office sought to deport him as a “foreign criminal” under s 32(5), UK Borders Act 2007. Mr Johnson argued this would breach his Art 8 right to family life and be unlawfully discriminatory under Art 14 since he would not be liable to deportation had his parents been married.
The Court of Appeal found in favour of the Home Office. Ruling in the Supreme Court, however, Lady Hale and four Justices unanimously held that Mr Johnson should be allowed to remain in the UK.
Delivering the lead judgment, Lady Hale said reform of provisions discriminating against children of unmarried parents meant that since 2006, a person in Mr Johnson’s position would be given automatic British citizenship at birth.
Lady Hale said birth outside wedlock was a “status” for the purpose of Art 14 and fell within the class of “suspect” grounds where very weighty reasons were required to justify discrimination. What needed to be justified was Mr Johnson’s liability to deportation when he would not be liable but for the accident of birth outside wedlock fro which he was not responsible. No justification had been suggested for this and therefore it could not be said that Mr Johnson’s claim that deportation would breach his Convention rights was clearly unfounded.
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