Ireland is to press the British government to review domestic laws on citizenship in Northern Ireland after a UK court ruled that people born in the region are legally British citizens even if they identify as Irish.

Simon Coveney, the Irish foreign affairs minister, said he would raise the case of Emma DeSouza with the Northern Ireland secretary on Tuesday. He is concerned that British law is not “consistent” with the unique rights enshrined in the Good Friday agreement peace deal that allow anyone born in Northern Ireland to be Irish, British or both.

Citizenship + Identity provisions critical to the GFA. UK Govt has pledged to review rules around citizenship and deliver a long term solution consistent with GFA. An outcome is urgently needed and I will raise this again with Secretary of State for NI tomorrow @EmmandJDeSouza — Simon Coveney (@simoncoveney) October 14, 2019

His intervention is not the first in the case of Emma and Jake DeSouza, who lost an immigration case in Belfast on Monday.

US-born Jake DeSouza had applied for residency rights in Northern Ireland under EU freedom of movement rules that allow third country spouses of EU citizens to live with their husbands or wives in an EU member state without going through national immigration.

The Home Office rejected the application on the grounds that it considered Emma DeSouza a British citizen, and said the only way it could deal with the case was for her to “renounce her status as a British citizen”.

She argued that she was Irish, always carried an Irish passport and had the right to be legally recognised as Irish, albeit living in a UK jurisdiction. She initially won her case at a first-tier immigration and asylum tribunal in February last year, which ruled that under the terms of the Good Friday agreement the people of Northern Ireland had a unique right to identify in multiple ways.

The Home Office won an appeal on Monday prompting a wave of local protests that nationality rights in the Good Friday agreement were not being recognised in British law.

The judges, Justice Lane and Judge Rintoul, the president of the upper tribunal, concluded that by birth Emma DeSouza was British: “As a matter of law, Mrs DeSouza is at present a British citizen in the current time.”

In their ruling Lane and Rintoul, said there was nothing in domestic legislation “giving effect” to the peace deal.

DeSouza vowed to keep fighting for her right to remain Irish without having to first renounce her British citizenship. She said she was deeply disappointed by the decision that “ruled against the Good Friday Agreement” and vowed to try to get a fresh hearing in the court of appeal.

She said she was “deeply disheartened” the tribunal ruled that she was a British citizen and that until she accepted this she could not access her rights as an Irish citizen and EU citizen in Northern Ireland. “This is not in line with the spirit, or the purpose or the intent of the Good Friday agreement,” she said.

The Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said Ireland had amended its domestic law after the 1998 peace deal to deliver the agreed rights. Questions will now be asked as to why UK domestic law was not amended likewise.

DeSouza had argued that she should not have to renounce her British citizenship, contending she never considered herself British and was entitled to identify as Irish under the GFA.

The court’s ruling centres on whether the tribunal had earlier made an error of law, not on whether the law delivered the Good Friday agreement or not. They found that international treaties such as the GFA were entered into under royal prerogative but that this prerogative did not extend to altering domestic law without the intervention of parliament.

“Quite simply, a treaty is not part of English law unless and until it has been incorporated into the law by legislation,” the ruling said, and DeSouza or others could not derive rights or be denied rights by an international treaty.



The Home Office said: “The Home Office is absolutely committed to upholding the Belfast [Good Friday] agreement. We respect the right of the people of Northern Ireland to choose to identify as British or Irish or both and their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship.

“We are pleased that the upper tribunal agrees that UK nationality law is consistent with the Belfast agreement.”