It is difficult to describe the uncertainty, despondency and frustration experienced daily by stateless people living in the UK.

As a stateless person, I struggled for years to obtain settled status, which would allow my family and me to get on with our lives. Faced with an openly hostile Home Office, my application was dogged by labyrinthine bureaucracy and unexplained delays.

After I fled to the UK to escape torture and imprisonment for my role in the Arab Spring protests in 2011, Bahrain, my home country, stripped me of my citizenship.

Revoking citizenship is a particularly pernicious tactic used by the Bahraini regime to target its opponents and it trapped me in legal limbo, without any nationality.

Even after I was recognised as a refugee and completed five years on what is called refugee leave, it took over two more years and the intervention of a British court before I was finally granted settled status in September 2019.

I was not the only victim of this delay. My daughter was born in November 2017. The patriarchal Bahraini legal code prevents my Bahraini wife from passing citizenship to her children, and children born in the UK are only British citizens at birth if at least one parent has British citizenship or settled status at that time.

My daughter, therefore, was born stateless.

Today over 10million people remain without nationality worldwide and the number continues to grow. Since 2011, only 943 stateless individuals have been granted asylum in Britain.

It was not until my wife and I applied for settled status that I realised the full ramifications of my statelessness.

As a signatory to the 1954 and 1961 UN Conventions, the UK is legally obliged to undertake measures to reduce statelessness and safeguard stateless people’s rights but significant changes in Home Office policy have undermined this obligation.

In 2005, the Home Office stopped granting settled status to refugees. Instead, people granted asylum are permitted to stay for five years, with settled status granted only after this period.

In 2009, the Home Office introduced its ‘active review’ policy, which can seriously delay the grant of settled status after those five years.

If it wasn’t for these changes, my daughter would have been born a British citizen.

It was not until my wife and I applied for settled status that I realised the full ramifications of my statelessness. She was pregnant and we were hopeful our applications would be approved promptly, ensuring our child would be born British.

However, as days turned into weeks, with no response from the Home Office, the chances of this dream being realised appeared increasingly remote. Despite appealing to the government, my daughter was born without me or my wife being settled.

My interactions with the Home Office, the organisation tasked with creating a ‘hostile environment’ for migrants, were marked by suspicion and indifference. I waited over half a year from my initial application before hearing anything from them. I was told they needed more time to assess my case.

After months of sporadic, unsatisfactory responses to my repeated requests for updates, I resorted to threatening legal action in May 2018 – to which they responded with another request for more time.

Finally, when a year had passed without any progress, I filed a legal case against the government in June 2019. The impact was immediate; unenthusiastic about the prospect of a public legal spat, the Home Office confirmed my family’s settled status.

After almost two years without nationality, my daughter became entitled to register with the British citizenship she would have been born with.

However, the Home Office charges £1,012 for that registration, most of which is far in excess of its administrative costs. They are literally profiting from their own delays and obstruction.

Amnesty and the Project for the Registration of Children as British citizens have been campaigning to end this injustice – with over 30,000 people signing a petition calling for change.

This month, the High Court will decide whether these extortionate fees are legal.

My struggle to obtain settled status was an exhausting, exasperating experience. Uncertainty about our future in Britain created significant and unnecessary stress for myself, my wife and my children.

However, with support from lawyers, human rights groups and parliamentarians, I had considerable advantages over the majority of people forced to grapple with the Home Office’s belligerent bureaucracy.

My daughter will finally receive her first photo ID in the coming days, shortly after her second birthday.

Despite the difficulties, I will always be grateful to Britain for granting me refuge and am proud that my daughter will grow up as a British citizen. However, stateless children should not have to bear the burden of their parent’s misfortunes.

The government should be doing what it can to reduce statelessness, not increasing the number of children born stateless in the UK – and not requiring stateless children to pay swingeing fees to acquire a nationality.

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