Background checks for some citizenship-seekers seem to take years

For seven years, Dr Munzir Adil Alimam Hamid has hoarded bills. “I’m very OCD like that,” he said on Friday on a video call from his office.

It meant that when it came time for him and his wife to apply for citizenship, he had a cascade of documents as proof of residency all ready to go.

He has never had run-ins with the law in Ireland, he says – or in Sudan, his country of birth, or in Saudi Arabia, where he trained as a doctor and married.

His lawyer joked about how straightforward his case was, says Dr Hamid, a medic specialising in cancer treatment.

But their applications for citizenship went in nearly two years ago and he is still waiting for a decision.

The reason given? Background checks, says Dr Hamid. But “I’ve never heard of a background check that takes so long”, he says.

Nonetheless, that’s a refrain that immigration lawyers say they have been hearing more frequently from the Department of Justice.

But the continued ambiguity around what background checks are done exactly, and so how it might be holding the process up, makes it difficult for applicants or their representatives to press their cases – even in the courts.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice hasn’t responded to queries sent on 18 September, asking what “background checks” means exactly.

Earlier this month, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee, a Fine Gael TD, told the Dáil that some international checks can take a long time “and are largely out of the control of my Department”.

Maybe, a week away

Dr Hamid says their kids joke about visas and passports at home all the time. Who has the right one, and who has the wrong one.

Their baby boy Ezz, who was born here, has an Irish passport. Their little girl quickly had her citizenship approved but is waiting for her certificate.

Meanwhile, Dr Hamid and his wife are waiting for their decision.

The scenario means they can’t really holiday together in Europe, he said.

He wants to wait until they all have Irish passports to travel, he says. He doesn’t want them to grow up with scarring airport experiences.

“I know it’s my fate. I’m from Sudan; everywhere we go, we’re taken aside. We’re looked at differently because of our passport,” he says.

Yet he wants to take his kids to Spain or France without border control pulling them aside and embarrassing them, Dr Hamid said.

“I don’t want to sound entitled, but we thought maybe we could do a week in Spain,” he said.

He doesn’t understand why the Department of Justice would keep him in the dark for so long, he says. “I don’t even have a driving offence, no tickets, nothing. We thought we’d done everything correctly.”

Imran Khurshid, a partner and solicitor at Daly Khurshid Solicitors, says most of his clients who get the background-checks response have Muslim backgrounds.

Salman Mahmood, an engineer in Cookstown who has also been told that his lengthy application time is due to background checks, says that is the kind of concern that he dwells on.

Maybe it’s because of his religion, he says. Or because he’s a man, given current hostility against immigrant men, he says.

His wife, who applied a month after him and was also born in Pakistan, got approval this year.

It was then that he wondered if gender was behind it, he says. “Maybe I was randomly selected for these background checks because I’m a male, I don’t know, these are all speculations.”

Unsure why

Dr Hamid says that sometime around May, his lawyer suggested submitting a request under the Freedom of Information Act to see if that would shed light on the delay. It didn’t.

“They’d ticked the box on [garda] vetting, but it doesn’t say anything else,” says Dr Hamid.

In July, his lawyer sent a warning to the Department of Justice, asking them to give a decision or they would see them in court, he says.

The department said they’re still checking his background, Dr Hamid says.

Mahmood, who was born in Pakistan and moved to Ireland to work as a software engineer after living in the United Kingdom and Denmark, had the same response.

His lawyer had followed up on his application, filed in March 2022, and was also told they were still running background checks.

“So, it’s been six months, no communications since then, nothing at all,” says Mahmood.

Mention of ongoing background checks seems to have neutered one of the ways in which applicants could push for their applications to be resolved, say immigration lawyers.

Applicants could go to court, says Khurshid, partner and solicitor at Daly Khurshid Solicitors. But now, the Department of Justice can wave off those threats by pointing to background checks.

“So a judge would say, why are you here? They’re doing background checks,” said Khurshid.

Eoghan McMahon, solicitor at McGrath Mullan, said that in the past if someone had waited more than two years without good reason, they would get a decision quickly after a legal threat.

“This has recently changed,” he says.

Checking goodness

Underlying the confusion is a continued ambiguity about what exactly the department is checking for.

Those applying for citizenship have to be judged of “good character” – but how deep into one’s past officials search, or who they ask, remains unclear.

“I have never been able to get any clarification on the nature of these background checks,” says Wendy Lyon, partner and solicitor at Abbey Law.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice didn’t respond to a query sent on Monday asking if it has drawn up guidelines for assessing the character of would-be citizens.

In August 2021, the Department of Justice said it was working on guidelines and hoping to publish them by the end of that year.

It also said that there is no settled definition of good character, but it generally means that someone’s behaviour is reasonably aligned with current societal values.

Submissions drawn up by officials to explain why someone didn’t meet the good character criteria take into account someone’s criminal and immigration history, they said.

Both Dr Hamid, who currently works at a hospital in Cork, and Mahmood, the engineer in Cookstown, say they had requested police clearance from countries they had lived in before.

It was quick to get, they say.

McMahon, the solicitor, says good character checks most likely go beyond regular police clearances.

They might consider charges that were dropped or if someone was tried and acquitted, he says. “It’s a very problematic area, I wouldn’t say it’s unproblematic.”

But to some degree, he understands it, he said.

Although it doesn’t justify the lack of transparency and prolonged periods stuck in limbo, McMahon says. “They should be able to justify the delays more.”

“When it’s shrouded in such secrecy, your mind can wander and assume what it must be that they’re doing, and maybe, in fact, it might not be that at all,” he said. “It might just be bureaucratic lethargy,” McMahon said.

Meanwhile, lawyers like Lyon and Khurshid say they worry about whether the Department of Justice reaches out to dictatorships, to feed their responses into assessments of character.

Earlier this month, People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy asked Minister McEntee whether that happens.

An Garda Síochána is asked to make inquiries into someone’s background, she said. “The detail and extent of which is a matter for An Garda Síochána.”

It isn’t their practice to comment on the details and scope of these queries for “sound security and operational reasons,” McEntee said.

Lyon says she was surprised when the Department of Justice asked for police clearance for a client, who is a refugee with politically motivated charges against them in their country of birth.

She wrote back that she would never ask her client to do that, she says. Requests like that worry her, Lyon says.

Mahmood and Dr Hamid both say they want the Department of Justice to be upfront about the status of these checks and when it thinks they’ll be wrapped up, without revealing too much about the process.

“If there is a problem in this so-called background check, they should tell me,” said Dr Hamid.