claim to citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies

14:28 Feb 21, 2019 

Thank you all for your rich contributions. So many info came out!
I'll take the formula "raison pour la citoyenneté".

@Eliza: it's indeed an "entry of birth" and not a "birth certificate".

Thanks again for your help.

12:30 Feb 21, 2019 

B D, je me contente de lire les infos et le texte source pour répondre à la q. : on ne sait rien de la situation à part ce qui est dit dans l'intro. All I'm saying is that in a UK admin form, a father is asked why he thinks/claims he's British and his answer is that he was born in the UK. That's all I know - and all I need to know to answer the q. as asked. Tout le reste, ça ne peut être que suppositions, whatever British nationality law may provide. Katsy, oui, je crois qu'on est d'accord.

12:15 Feb 21, 2019 

I thought, Ph_B, that I was making the same point as you. The father is saying what gives him the right to say he is British

12:03 Feb 21, 2019 

The father didn't need to assert his own claim to be British. If he was at the British consulate registering the birth of his child, he would have proved he was a British citizen by producing his passport. The only claim in question would be that of the child and would be based upon the father having been born in the UK. However, other criteria would have to be met in order for the child's claim to citizenship to be accepted.

Also, note the subtlety of this being a claim and not an application. The child would have a claim to CUKC by virtue of their father's status, they would not need to apply for citizenship, however the claim would need to be proven and the father's place of birth would be only the chief criterion, not the only one. The current scandal about the denial of citizenship to many of the Windrush generation of immigrants from the former colonies, centres on them having held CUKC status at the time they entered the UK. Some of them have been deported and some have been required to apply for naturalisation because the Home Office (while Theresa May was Home Secretary) destroyed the records proving when they entered the UK on their parents' CUKC passports.

11:56 Feb 21, 2019 

Le formulaire demande au père (column concerning the father) pourquoi il prétend être britannique. La raison qu'il donne, c'est qu'il est né au Royaume-Uni (information in the column is the father\'s date and place of birthh (in UK)). De quoi vous parlez toutes, là ? :-)

11:49 Feb 21, 2019 

Eliza, correctly, noted that this would apparently be a document registering the birth of the child, but not a "birth certificate". However, the claim to citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies in the "column concerning the father" would be the child's claim, not the father's claim. For the child's claim to be accepted, certain other criteria would need to be met, e.g. that the father was married to the mother at the time of the birth and of good character.

11:37 Feb 21, 2019 

Well actually I think we are looking at this from slightly different angles. We have a birth certificate of a child who is probably if not certainly considered by the authorities as British (otherwise why would they issue a birth certificate?) I'll leave aside things like citizenship, right of abode etc.
The information we are dealing with concerns the father. The father says he is British, he claims to be British. And on what is this claim based? The fact that he was born in the UK. So in this particular case we are not talking about anyone wanting to be British, but justifying (to echo the French term) why he is British - not by naturalisation, not by family necessarily, but by birth in the country.

I realise I am rephrasing what Eliza has said earlier, but I think it's worth doing.

11:25 Feb 21, 2019 

Sorry if a disagree seems harsh, but British citizenship could always be denied to the foreign-born child of a British father, at the discretion of the Home Secretary, even if they managed to tick all the boxes and there were (and still are) boxes to tick other than just that of the father having been born in the UK. It is essential to specify that this is CUKC, not any other type of UK citizenship.

10:19 Feb 21, 2019 

British nationality and citizenship is more complicated than is the case with other countires. See: https://www.gov.uk/types-of-british-nationality/british-citi... Note that having a British parent does not automatically confer British citizenship.

"You may be eligible for British citizenship if you have a British parent.

It depends on where and when you were born, and your parents’ circumstances."
https://www.gov.uk/apply-citizenship-british-parent

Indeed, I had to apply to the Home Secretary for my son to be registered as a British citizen, because he was born overseas and his father was not British. Citizenship was granted as a matter of the Home Secretary's discretion, not as a right. So. Eliza is wrong about that.

Also, the wording of this, with its reference to the colonies, indicates that the birth occurred before 1 January 1983.

Note that the rules were different before 1983 regarding the eligibility for automatic British citizenship on the grounds of the father's (not the mother's) place of birth etc. https://www.gov.uk/apply-citizenship-british-parent/born-bef...

06:37 Feb 21, 2019 

Je me demande si on ne parlerait pas ici de nationalité. Il s'agit d'un formulaire administratif et je ne suis pas certain qu'en français ou en France en tout cas, on emploierait le mot « citoyenneté » dans ce contexte. On le réserverait plutôt à des textes de nature sociologique, sciences politiques, etc. <p>Ici (https://www.vie-publique.fr/decouverte-institutions/citoyen/... l'administration explique que la « citoyenneté » est un lien social entre un individu et l'État, qui découle de la « nationalité », qui est un lien juridique. S'agissant d'un service administratif (consulat), je dirais que l'objet du formulaire en question est la recherche du lien juridique plutôt que du lien social.
<p>À mon avis, une administration chercherait à établir la nationalité, pas la citoyenneté, d'un enfant en demandant à ses parents de quelle nationalité ils sont.<p>[Modifié pour ajouter une virgule après « État »]

04:56 Feb 21, 2019 

Normally a child born abroad gets a birth certificate from that country's authorities, and then the child's parents register the birth with their own consulate (or the consulate of one parent, if only one parent is from somewhere else). That's definitely how it works for the UK: https://www.gov.uk/register-a-birth

So this would technically not be a birth certificate, but a consular birth registration/registration of birth abroad. Either way, the translation is the same -- I'm just clarifying what you're talking about.

Claim to citizenship etc. etc. + father's date and place of birth: if that phrase appears in the "column concerning the father" and the same phrase appears in the column concerning the mother, then it means that the basis for the father's UK citizenship is his birth in the UK. If it does not appear in the parent columns, i.e. it's about the child, then it means that the basis for the child's UK citizenship is its father's birth in the UK (i.e. its dad is British, therefore it is British).