Immigration

The grant of British citizenship under of the British Nationality Act 1981, s 6(1)  was not a fundamental human right. There was no statutory definition of the requirement of “good character” in Sch 1, para 1(1) to the Act. It was a term capable of carrying a range of meanings, and required an exercise in evaluation to apply it. It was open to the secretary of state, acting rationally, to adopt a high standard of good character, and one higher than other reasonable decision-makers might have adopted. To give rise to serious doubts as to an applicant’s good character for the purposes of naturalisation, it was not necessary that the applicant should have been personally or directly involved in the commission of war crimes in some indirect way.