Opinion

Jim Gibney: Emma and Jake De Souza caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare

Jake DeSouza and wife Emma, who are claiming the UK Home Office is refusing to recognise her Irish citizenship. Picture by Hugh Russell
Jake DeSouza and wife Emma, who are claiming the UK Home Office is refusing to recognise her Irish citizenship. Picture by Hugh Russell Jake DeSouza and wife Emma, who are claiming the UK Home Office is refusing to recognise her Irish citizenship. Picture by Hugh Russell

The early years of a young couple’s married life are normally the busiest with their focus on home and family; sharing the ups and downs of living in the same space; acclimatising themselves to the needs of one another; ensuring financial security through employment; looking to the future with hope and optimism and preparing for that through a joint endeavour of pooled resources.

When they married in July 2015, in Belfast’s City Hall, Emma and Jake De Souza expected their young lives to revolve around the well-established newly-wed patterns of home building.

Instead their lives took on the nightmarish experience of the central character in Franz Kafka’s book ‘The Trial’, who is accused of a crime he has not committed, yet he is unable to prove his innocence. He becomes enmeshed in a state bureaucracy which swallows him up, consumes his life, is all-powerful, unanswerable and unaccountable yet it governs his daily existence in a sinister and insidious life-controlling manner.

The state directs his life. He is confined by it and by decisions taken by strangers. He loses control.

So too with the De Souza family. Britain’s ‘Immigration and Visa Department’ has been directing their lives since Emma De Souza applied for a residency visa for her American-born husband nearly two years ago.

Anonymous strangers in an office, somewhere in the vast London bureaucracy, rejected their application and are running their lives and dictating how much influence they have over the direction of it.

Refused the visa the couple cannot travel freely because Jake’s passport is in a filing cabinet in the state bureaucracy.

Controlled movement means he cannot return to the US. He has missed the funerals of two of his uncles. He has missed three appointments with a consultant for a permanent and debilitating intestinal condition. His work options are limited without his passport. His passport will be held until his appeal is heard regarding his residency application. No one knows how long it will take.

Family life for the De Souzas revolves around the media, politicians, legal advisers, human rights groups. Their privacy is gone as they battle for their civil and human rights and a normal life and peace of mind. There is no end in sight.

Sinn Féin Seanadóir Niall Ó Donnghaile and the SDLP’s MLA Claire Hanna are involved in helping to end the couples’ plight.

The case was highlighted in the Seanad, where its Fine Gael leader, Jerry Buttimer, expressed his concern and Seanadóir Ó Donnghaile is seeking a meeting with the foreign affairs minister Simon Coveney.

But it is not just the Kafkaesque abuse of their human rights that concerns the De Souzas.

The British government seek to control their minds and bend their will.

Emma De Souza is an Irish citizen. She carries an Irish passport. She was born in Magherafelt. She considers herself Irish.

She bases her nationality on her place of birth, and her passport. She looks to the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) and the ‘Northern Ireland Act 1998’ to uphold her Irish nationality.

The GFA, endorsed by the Irish and British government and the people of Ireland in a referendum, explicitly accepts that people born in the north can “identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may choose”.

This recognition is a fundamental tenet of the agreement. It is directly linked to the constitutional changes that the Irish and British governments made and that anchor the GFA in the new post-ceasefires society, north and south.

But Emma De Souza has been told by the immigration authorities that she is considered “automatically” British because she was born in the north.

And that to claim her Irish nationality she must first ‘renounce’ her British nationality. A nationality she has never claimed nor accepts.

The De Souzas are in limbo. Their lives are on hold.

Numerous people have experienced what the De Souzas are going through and were forced to renounce British nationality or accept it before a loved one was given a residency visa.

The provisions of the GFA are being rewritten through institutional coercion. The De Souzas are bravely standing against this coercion.

They are not alone.

But the Irish, British and US governments also need to support them.