Ruling allows non-national parents of EU children to work

FOR the past four years, Halima Usman and her nine-year-old daughter have been dreaming about shutting the door for the last time on their asylum seeker residential housing in north Cork.

Yesterday, a European Court of Justice made that possibility very real after it ruled immigration policies, which refuse to allow the parents of European Union citizen children the right to live and work in an EU country, were in breach of EU law. The forced deportations of such parents should not be allowed, it said.

Halima, a Nigerian who has spent the past four years living on €19.10 per week, says the judgement would allow her and her daughter, also called Halima, to move to Cork city so Halima Senior can fulfil her dream of studying law at UCC.

“It has been so hard for the past four years. I have studied childcare in Mallow but often, I was relying on friends to pay for photocopying. I couldn’t afford to buy a book. Often I had essays in weeks late as I had to wait for a certain book to come back into the library. I want to do something with my life and now I can. My daughter has dreamt of us having our own home. This give us freedom,” she said.

The Irish Immigrant Centre, NASC, says it has been inundated with calls from asylum seekers and former asylum seekers wanting to know if they will benefit from the European ruling.

Many other non-nationals whose children were born here will not benefit from the decision as their children are not Irish citizens. Since January 2005, a child is only a citizen if one of their parents was living in Ireland for three of the four years prior to their birth.

Halima’s daughter was born in Ireland in 2002. Back then, prior to the 2004 referendum sought by then-justice minister Michael McDowell, all children born in this country were entitled to automatic citizenship. Halima and her daughter left Ireland when she was still a baby, returning here in 2007 as they could not cope with life in Nigeria.

NASC chief executive Fiona Finn said: “We welcome this long-awaited ruling which recognises the rights of Irish citizen children. It will affect a finite number of people, but it will affect them profoundly. It is a very new situation for everyone. We hope that we will be able to work co-operatively with the Department of Justice on this.

“If they make it clear what steps people should take, what information they should provide and what procedures they should follow, we will be able to help people to make applications that the department will be able to process quickly. We will be writing to the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service (INIS) to ask them to work with us so the processing of this new type of application will go smoothly, for everyone’s benefit.”

Declan Walsh, European law lecturer at UCC, last night said the new Minister for Justice Alan Shatter will be immediately faced with drawing up new guidelines to incorporate these new rights of the citizen child to reside with its parents and the right to be supported by those parents.