Emma DeSouza is from Magherafelt in Co Derry and applied for a residence card for her US-born husband Jake to live and work in Northern Ireland in 2015 - the same year they were married in Belfast. She identified herself as an Irish citizen in the application.

Why did she bring a legal case?

She took the case after the UK Home Office rejected the application on the basis that it considered DeSouza a British citizen because she was born in Northern Ireland. She was told she could reapply identifying herself as British or renounce her UK citizenship and reapply as an Irish citizen. She claimed she never considered herself British so she could not renounce a citizenship she never had. She later said that she had “discovered that my lifelong Irish identity is evidently considered secondary to an unclaimed British identity.”