The Home Office is threatening to deport a teenage granddaughter of a former Chagos Islander, even though her mother holds British citizenship.
Taniella Moustache, 18, who has lived in Milton Keynes for six years and hopes to study psychology at a British university, could find herself separated from her mother and sent overseas where she has no family. Taniella and her younger sister, Nesta risk being deported when they reach the age of 20 unless their mother can raise sufficient funds to pay for legal help to apply for their citizenship.
“The Home Office said they cannot give my children British passports because they were not born in England. They say I have to apply for citizenship but I cannot afford it. It is a lot of money, around £1,600 per child. I get paid only £600 to last every two weeks and my rent is £600 … sometimes I don’t have enough money to eat.” The 18-year-old’s mother, Jeanette explained.
Her grandmother was among those forcibly evicted by the British government from the Chagos Islands in 1971 and resettled in the Seychelles. The consequences of that original expulsion – to clear the archipelago for a US airbase on Diego Garcia – now threaten the third generation of the UK-based Chagossian community, who do not have automatic rights to British citizenship.
Alex Finch, a solicitor at the law firm Fragomen who specialises in nationality cases, and who advises the Chagos Refugees Group, said: “Generally British citizenship only goes down through one generation. Often the middle generation would have been given citizenship in 2002 through the British Overseas Territories Act. It is the grandchildren who are now facing difficulties. The Chagossians were removed from their homes against their will. There is a historic injustice.”
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