The six-year-old British-born boy who was left stranded and stateless in Belgium after the Home Office revoked his passport will be reunited with his mother in Britain today.
Mohamed Bangoura, whose mother is Guinean but whose father is British, was on a three week summer holiday with family friends in Brussels before being turned away from the August 26 flight that was due to take him back home.
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Hawa Keita, 29, was not able to travel with her son, who has lived in the UK his whole life, because her passport was with the Home Office to renew her residency permit. The pair have not seen each other for almost a month.
The Home Office had revoked Mohamed’s passport because it said it had been issued by mistake. Because Ms Keita was married to her estranged Guinean husband at the time of Mohamed’s birth in Leeds, the authorities said, he did not qualify as a British citizen. British immigration law says that in such cases citizenship can only be granted through the mother and her husband, regardless of the biological father.
The Home Office said it had sent Ms Keita a letter in March but the single mum, who lives in Sheffield where Mohamed is due to start school in two days, insists she never received it.
After his plight received widespread media attention, the Home Office issued Mohamed with an emergency passport, meaning he is able to fly to Manchester on Friday to be greeted by his mother.
Earlier this week, Ms Keita told The Telegraph of the stress and heartbreak caused by what critics claimed was the latest example of the Home Office’s controversial “hostile environment”.
“Today I am the happiest mother in the world,” Ms Keita said.
Immigration experts have warned that Mohamed still faces being rendered stateless by the revocation of his British citizenship because he has never applied for Guinean citizenship.
Jan Doerfel is an barrister specialising in UK immigration law and has been informally advising the family. He said that if Mohamed was not legally British, he would be entitled to claim citizenship because he was stateless and had lived in Britain for more than five years.
Letter to Home Secretary asking for the stateless 6-year-old boy stuck in Belgium to be brought home immediately to his mother @EdwardJDavey @LibDemPress pic.twitter.com/4vBGwmgls2
— Catherine Bearder (@catherinemep) September 5, 2018
“The Home Office should urgently investigate how this could happen, take disciplinary action against those responsible and waive registration fees for the boy’s nationality application which will now be necessary,” the London-based lawyer said.
Mohamed was helped by Catherine Bearder, a Liberal Democrat member of the European Parliament in Brussels, who wrote to the Home Secretary Sajid Javid demanding the boy be brought home.