Claire Duggar has become a celebrity in the UK and the USA, after her appearance on the US talk show, The View. She has been quizzed on whether she is still eligible to be a British citizen, after the high court ruling that she should be allowed a naturalization visa. According to legal experts, who spoke to The Independent, Claire may not even be British by the present standards, because her parents both had the nationality of the European Union. In other words, Claire was not an “abe,” which suggests that while she had British citizenship when she was born, this was not the citizenship of the United Kingdom at the time of her birth.
This is the crux of the issue, because if a person is not entitled to a designation as name, they cannot get a naturalization visa either. There are many people who fall into this category, after all. A lot of people simply assume that they have British citizenship at birth, but in actuality they might not, and the British authorities usually treat them as foreigners for life. If you fall into this category, there is therefore no longer any automatic right to British citizenship once you reach the age of majority, unless your parents’ nationality was British when you were born. This means that the status of British citizenship automatically disappears once the age of majority has been reached for that particular country.
Claire did not actually lose her citizenship of the UK, despite what her lawyers claimed during the divorce proceedings. The British High Court has merely ruled that a partnership involving her is not a true marriage, despite being two people with the same gender, and that she can now apply for a leave to remain single. This leaves open the possibility of her applying for and obtaining a leave to remain in the future, which would indicate that she would be able to remain legally married to her husband, in order to claim the benefits of being a spouse, including a spousal benefit.