The applicant appealed refusal of his writ of habeas corpus. He had been arrested pending removal to Pakistan. He said that he had been registered a British Citizen under the 1948 Act. Whilst in Pakistan he had substituted his own photograph for that of his deceased relative, and entered the UK under the assumed name, and later obtained registration as a UK citizen. He said that he remained a UK citizen until his citizenship was revoked under section 20.
Held: The appeal failed. Stephenson LJ said that the ‘registration was a nullity’.
Roskill LJ: ‘before the provisions of section 20 can be prayed in aid, in my judgment the appellant must show that he can bring himself within subsection (1) of that section. He seeks to do so by reliance upon the fact of registration as evidenced by the certificate. If it were clear that the appellant was the Javed Iqbal originally named and identified in the Pakistani passport and in the other relevant documents and that the Secretary of State had intended to grant registration to that person, this argument would clearly have great force because it would be to that person so named and identified that that grant would have been directed. But the evidence is that that person was dead. The Secretary of State’s intention cannot have been to grant registration to the appellant for he did not know who the appellant was. He wrongly believed the appellant to be Javed Iqbal, which he was not, nor could have been, for that individual was dead.
There are, I think, only three possible effects of the purported registration. First, it was a grant to Javed Iqbal. Secondly, it was a grant to the appellant. Thirdly, it was a grant to nobody but was a nullity. I have given my reasons already for rejecting the first two possibilities. There remains the third, that the purported grant was a nullity. I accept that in some cases it may be difficult to draw a dividing line in these cases between a registration which is a nullity and therefore void, as I think is the case with the present registration, in which case the alleged citizen by registration cannot bring himself within section 20(1) at all, and a registration which is only voidable, in which case the machinery of section 20 . . has to be invoked . . [Counsel for the Secretary of State] accepted that it was not easy to formulate a dividing line between the two classes of case. I agree, but wherever that line is drawn, I am clearly of the view that the instant case is one in which the alleged British registration was a nullity.’
Geoffrey Lane LJ: ‘It seems to me that the only question to be decided is whether the appellant ever was a citizen of the United Kingdom by registration. I find it difficult to see how he could be. He chose to assume the identity of a dead man, he took the oath of allegiance and filled in the necessary forms in the dead man’s name. I find it impossible to say that in those circumstances Sultan Mahmood became a citizen of the United Kingdom any more than did Javed Iqbal. The proceedings were ineffective and section 20 never applied.’
Judges:
Roskill LJ, Stephenson LJ, Geoffrey Lane LJ
Citations:
[1981] QB 59
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Bibi and others v Entry Clearance Officer, Dhaka CA 18-Jul-2007
The deceased had come to live in the UK and obtain citizenship under somebody else’s identity. After his death his wife and children sought clearance to come to live here.
Held: Her appeal failed. The residence of her late husband was . .
Cited – Hysaj and Others, Regina (on The Application of) v Secretary of State for The Home Department SC 21-Dec-2017
The court was asked whether the misrepresentations made by the appellants in their applications for United Kingdom citizenship made the grant of that citizenship a nullity, rather than rendering them liable to be deprived of that citizenship under . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Immigration
Updated: 04 December 2022; Ref: scu.254615