In 2017, my daughter was born in London without a nationality. She has never owned a passport and cannot leave the country. Her only official form of identification remains her birth certificate. For years, attempts to resolve my daughter’s status appear to have been actively obstructed by the UK government. Unfortunately for my family, as a stateless refugee and vocal human rights activist, the Home Office views me as an enemy.
I fled to Britain from Bahrain almost a decade ago, after being tortured and imprisoned for joining the country’s Arab spring uprisings. After being granted political asylum, I continued campaigning for democratic reform in my homeland, leading Bahrain’s government to arbitrarily revoke my Bahraini nationality in 2015.
When my wife became pregnant, I grew concerned about the effect my statelessness would have on my child. Bahrain’s patriarchal legal code prevents mothers passing on citizenship to their children and, given that I had no nationality myself, my daughter risked being born stateless too. To prevent this, after five years as a refugee I applied for indefinite leave to remain in the UK, which would allow her to acquire British nationality at birth.
According to the Home Office, 95% of applications for indefinite leave to remain are processed within six months. However, after six months passed, during which time my daughter was born stateless, I was informed my case was “complex”, and would require more time. Over the next two years, during which I was twice forced to take legal action against the government, I began to understand why.
Exasperated by unexplained delays to my indefinite leave to remain, in 2019 I submitted a “subject access request” to obtain any personal information held on me by the Home Office and determine why it was so resistant to approving my residency application. The request revealed that the Home Office kept detailed records of my activities in the UK, including copies of articles, interviews and comments I had published in UK newspapers and international media outlets.
My records had also been shared with Manchester police, who earlier that year had inexplicably denied me entry to the Conservative party conference, despite being invited to speak at a side-event hosted by Freedom from Torture. It transpired I had been deemed a security risk because I participated in a protest four years earlier that tried to block Bahrain’s king visiting No 10. I realised that the government had monitored my activism for years. This was the “complexity” that had held up my application for so long.
The surveillance of activists by the British state is nothing new. As the continuing public inquiry into undercover policing has revealed, British police spent decades infiltrating leftwing activist groups, often by deeply immoral means. Last month it was revealed that former senior government minister and Labour peer Peter Hain was monitored for years over his anti-racist activism, with one officer labelling him a “South African terrorist” for campaigning against apartheid. Although I ultimately received my indefinite leave to remain status, my opposition to Britain’s relationship with dictatorships has put me in the sights of the Home Office.
Rather than addressing these historic injustices, under Priti Patel’s leadership the Home Office has continued to view activists as a security threat. Last January, it emerged that environmental and anti-war groups including Greenpeace and CND were included in a counter-terror policing document aimed at deterring violent extremism.
Labelling opposition and campaign groups as terrorists is a tactic straight out of the repressive playbook followed by authoritarian regimes like the one I had to flee in Bahrain. It seems the home secretary has long been an admirer: in 2010, months before our fledgling pro-democracy movement was brutally crushed, Patel enjoyed a state-funded trip to the country as a member of a pro-Bahrain parliamentary group. Last year she even toured a police department in Bahrain renowned for torturing prisoners, before meeting thejustice minister to discuss “areas of cooperation in the judicial and legal field”. As someone who has experienced Bahrain’s repression first-hand, including the torture and ongoing imprisonment of members of my own family, this cosy relationship is deeply alarming.
With a Home Office openly hostile to both refugees and so-called lefty do-gooders, my difficulties securing settled status in Britain are perhaps understandable. Yet three and a half years after my application for indefinite leave to remain, which was finally approved in 2019, my daughter has still not received the British citizenship she is entitled to by law, and the decision continues to be inexplicably delayed. We were also forced to pay £1,012 to complete her citizenship application, despite these prohibitive costs being ruled unlawful by the high court.
Regardless of the government’s attitude to my work, my daughter is a three-year-old child living in a precarious legal limbo, and the Home Office is required by law to resolve her statelessness. Yet the torturous process continues to drag on: of course the pandemic has slowed down a lot of bureaucracy, but my experiences so far suggest something deeper is at play.
Despite promising to “fix Britain’s broken asylum system”, the home secretary appears intent on further punishing those seeking refuge in the country, with the UN warning that reforms announced in March risked violating the 1951 Refugee Convention, which Britain helped draft.
The legislation proposed by Patel represents a new low in the Home Office’s campaign to demonise one of Britain’s most marginalised communities. If the home secretary were serious about reform, she would begin by ending the excessive and illegal citizenship fees and cease their collective punishment of children whose parents’ political views they disagree with.
Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei is the advocacy director of the UK-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy
