Ms Una Boyd:

Yes, the Home Office argument is fairly stark in that it essentially said that the failure to enact the citizenship provisions was entirely deliberate, because that clearly shows that there are no issues with the British Nationality Act and that it was compliant with the Good Friday Agreement. I think it described it as clearly being fully aligned with the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement, so it comes back to this idea that there is no will here. There is no acceptance from the British Government that there may have been something that was overlooked, that there may have been something that was not properly enacted. It is firmly standing behind the argument that its position is right, that the British Nationality Act is compliant with the Good Friday Agreement. As Ms DeSouza touched on, to do this it has essentially reread the citizenship provisions. What it is doing is separating the identity and the citizenship into two separate parts, which we do not have a lot of information on. We do not have preparatory documents that tell us exactly what was intended when this was drafted, so what one has to go to is the ordinary meaning of the terms of the treaty. A person has the right to identify and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, and accordingly, Irish and British citizenship are protected. There is a very deliberate link there, and the British Government has very intentionally reread that in a way that allows it to downplay the right to this - the idea that a person has every right to identify, but that does not mean there has to be any legal right to citizenship.