The_Guardian_-_2016-12-29

She has now written to appeal, but says in her complaint: “I am now left totally in limbo. I do not
know how long to wait for a reply. I do not know whether my application will be reopened or not.”
She was told the reason for the rejection was because she had not included her original passport.
In her complaint, Hawkins points out that she included a solicitor-approved photocopy of her
passport – which is permissible under the rules – plus a covering letter to explain why she could not
be without her passport for the four to six months it takes to process.
She said the application form included a box for reasons for not including a valid passport as long as
it was due to circumstances beyond your control. “Clearly my father dying did not qualify in the
Home Office’s eyes as beyond my control,” said Hawkins.
Hawkins’s complaint also states that her covering letter for her original application said that she
would provide her original passport once the case worker assigned to it needed to see it.
EU citizens in Britain post Brexit vote: ‘I feel
betrayed, not at home, sad’
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Hawkins, who is a software developer and the daughter of a former oil company executive, lived in
several countries as a child and says the UK is the only place she feels she can call home. She studied
maths at Cambridge University and settled in the UK in 1992. She lives in Surrey and has two
children, aged 15 and 17. “I always used to feel I had no roots. Because of my dad’s background we
used to move every five years. This is the first time I’ve laid down roots,” she said.
“I had a massive shock following the referendum. I felt very stressed and suddenly felt walking down
the street that the place didn’t want me any more. That feeling began to subside, but I thought I should
apply for citizenship.”
The application form, which includes a “flummoxing” requirement to list every absence from the UK
in the past 24 years, took an entire weekend to complete, she said. “It is important to realise that in
applying for permanent residency I am not gaining a right, I am only getting a document stating a right
I already have,” she said.
Her husband, Robert, raised another issue: that Europeans married to Britons do not have an
automatic right to citizenship. “As a British citizen, I had the expectation that marrying someone from
abroad would automatically give them the right to become a British citizen. That seems to be the case
unless your wife happens to come from the European Union,” he said.
Hawkins, who has resubmitted an application for permanent residency, said she believed her case
drew attention to the “discrimination against EU/UK marriages”. The British spouse cannot sponsor
their EU partner and the EU spouse has to apply on their own merits. If they have not worked and are