Ms Una Boyd:

I wish to echo what Ms DeSouza and Professor Harvey have said. I think the Irish legislation provides a really strong example of an entitlement to citizenship, not an automatic conferral, which is also drafted in a very careful way to prevent statelessness. The Home Office has made quite a lot of the statelessness argument itself and the tribunal picked up on it. The UN convention on statelessness states that one can only be rendered stateless if one does not have citizenship by operation of the law. If, like Ms DeSouza said, there is an entitlement to two different citizenships, then one would not be stateless and we are waiting to see a significant body of work on this that the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission has done which will hopefully be published quite soon. It will really be interesting to see.