Refugees waiting on citizenship decisions find the rules have quietly changed

In May 2025, Emrul Emon – who had been granted refugee status in February 2024 – applied for Irish citizenship. 

He didn’t hire a lawyer, he said, because he reckoned his application was straightforward. “I did everything myself.”

But since a couple of weeks ago, when he heard back from the Department of Justice’s citizenship unit, he has wondered if he needs one, Emon said. “I’m thinking about it.”

Before reading its letter, he said, he was almost sure it was positive. “I was surprised, yeah, yeah, definitely. It was just sudden …”

The letter said Emon didn’t have the necessary three years of residence counting toward citizenship.

Like many other refugees, he said, Emon had counted his time towards citizenship from when he arrived in Ireland and opened an asylum claim. 

That was May 2022, he said. So, counting from May 2022 to May 2025, that’s three years, said Emon. 

But “they want like, three years, after I got my status”. Calculating like that, he said, yes, he doesn’t have enough. 

That method of calculation, though, wasn’t the practice when he applied, immigration lawyers say.

They’ve helped scores of clients get approvals over the years, while calculating the time from when they opened an asylum claim, they say. Migrants-rights non-profits also advised people to count it that way in the guides they published.

But the letter Emon and other refugees have gotten recently from the Department of Justice seems to say that counting people’s time in the asylum process toward citizenship was never really policy .

“Reckonable residence in the State is calculated from the date of the grant of refugee status,” the letter said. 

It ends by saying that applicants have a chance to prove that their circumstances are “exceptional and compelling” enough for the Minister for Justice to do them a favour and waive that condition. 

Emon hadn’t heard or seen news of a pivot on how the Department of Justice calculates needed time for citizenship-seekers who’d applied before policies changed, he said.

A department notice announcing another recent change to the process for refugees to apply for citizenship didn’t mention this one.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice didn’t directly address a query asking why it’s not honouring its past practice for calculating that time for citizenship seekers. It’s unclear if it’s denying that it ever followed that policy.

Safe travels  

Emon says one crucial reason he needs citizenship is to briefly travel to his country of birth to take care of some business for his aged father.  

Besides, he really wants to see his dad one more time, he said. “I have to visit him at least once.”

Refugees living in Ireland often don’t have a valid passport from their country of birth, and go abroad from here on a travel document issued by the Department of Justice. 

But visiting their country of birth on a refugee travel document raises suspicion, can be risky, and might not even work.

It’s a lot safer to return to a country one had sought asylum from with the protection that a European passport offers. 

Trying to get a passport from the embassy or consulates of their country of birth here, even if possible, comes with its own set of risks.

The embassy of the Iranian regime in Dublin, for example, charges more than the normal rate and asks refugees to sign a statement that says in Persian, “I regret my decision to accept sanctuary from the country I currently reside in, and seek consular services from the representatives of the Islamic Republic of Iran”. 

And there’s no guarantee that people who brought themselves to the attention of Iranian officials as refugees, apologised for seeking asylum and paid more to get a passport, won’t be arrested and get stuck once they touch down in Tehran.

In 2016, Kianush Sanjari, an Iranian political activist who’d been granted refugee status in Norway but had been living in the United States, travelled to Iran to see his mum.

Soon after, he was arrested – and later sentenced to 11 years in jail, six years of which were suspended. He was also barred from leaving the country for two years after release.

In 2019, Sanjari was released on bail, out on a medical furlough. He’d been living in Iran, in the years after.

On 12 November 2024, he posted on X that he’d take his own life “in protest against dictatorship” if by the end of that day the Iranian regime didn’t release a few political prisoners he’d named.

They weren’t freed. Sanjari, who was 42, killed himself the next night in Tehran city.

See you in court

Sitting at his desk on a recent morning, Imran Khurshid, an immigration solicitor in Dublin, picks up the same letter that Emon got, saying a frantic refugee client sent it. 

“And I was contacted by other people as well, who got this letter and they were asking if I could represent them,” he says.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice did not directly address a query asking how many people had been impacted. 

He found the letter mystifying, Khurshid said.

Counting refugees’ time waiting in the asylum system towards citizenship was always the practice, and he’s got tons of approvals for his clients calculating like that, over the years, he said.

“And as many other solicitors would know, we never had any trouble, we never received this kind of letter before,” he said.

That practice wasn’t explicitly laid out as a policy in Irish citizenship law or the Department of Justice’s website, though.

A guide to refugee rights on the website of the Irish Refugee Council (IRC), mentions the Department of Justice’s recent about-face. 

The department’s letter seems to imply that if it used to approve citizenship requests from refugees who’d counted their time in the asylum system, it was doing them a favour by waiving the three-year condition altogether, said the IRC website.

And it doesn’t want to do that anymore “unless convinced by the “compelling reasons”. “We are currently considering the best way for people to respond,” it said.

Khurshid said he would most likely take these cases to the High Court. 

But he’s unsettled by a recent Civil Reform Bill from the Minister for Justice, Fianna Fáil’s Jim O’Callaghan TD, which if passed could redirect immigration cases to lower courts, making justice more expensive for so many people, Khurshid said. 

The Legal Aid Board doesn’t cover representation for non-asylum immigration cases, and for asylum cases doesn't cover judicial reviews. So citizenship applicants have to pay for their lawyers. 

If the law changes, it can be more expensive for clients because Circuit Courts award small compensations to winners, and so lawyers might charge people much more to file court cases, and not everyone can afford that, Khurshid said.

But yes, it saves money for the state, he said.

He’s also concerned about narrowed access to justice under that regime, Khurshid said.

“And I’m not saying a Circuit Court judge doesn’t know what they’re doing, but they don’t have the experience in immigration,” he said.

Off course 

The pivot on calculating citizenship-eligible time for past applicants coincides with the plans of Minister O’Callaghan, to make the road to citizenship and family reunion harder to cross for people with refugee status. 

Like how on 8 December 2025, the Department of Justice hardened its rules, asking refugees to wait five years after they got status instead of three. 

By rolling out these changes, he has said that he wants to slow population growth, and that more people seeking asylum pose a threat to “social cohesion”. 

Lucky Khambule of the Movement of Asylum Seekers Ireland (MASI), said he’s also been contacted by former members who, with sadness and surprise, got the letter saying they didn’t have three years of residence that counted. 

“Some had already spent years in the asylum system before gaining protection,” he said.

Their future plans hinged on “the previous timeline only to learn that they must now wait even longer”, he said. 

Now, they’re thrown off the path they thought they’d been on, he said.

That citizenship helps improve social integration of immigrants is the upshot of a 2023 study by researchers at the University of Luxembourg. 

Khambule said for so many people, Irish citizenship is a window to “education, family reunification, and gives people the confidence to fully invest in communities where they live”. 

This apparent rejection of past refugee citizenship-seekers who shouldn’t be impacted by new changes is going to make people feel like they don’t belong “even after being granted protection”, and that takes a toll, he said. 

Governments of course have the right to tweak policies, Khambule said, but they should assess the impact of their changes carefully, and be reasonable. 

The Department of Justice spokesperson said having people wait longer means they forge a stronger connection with the country “demonstrated over time”.

In the meantime, it is investing “in a range of measures related to integration, including community led initiatives, to support the inclusion of migrants and their families in Irish society”, they said. 

Degrees of separation 

Emon – the man in Dublin who was told he doesn’t have three years for citizenship – said he was also hoping to reunite with his fiancée, who lives in his country of birth, after he became a citizen. 

He’d planned for them to get married, he said, and try to make a go of life together here. 

And bringing her over would have been easier to do as an Irish citizen, he said.

He thought his approval was on his way, Emon said, he hadn’t done anything wrong to ruin his chances. 

But it may have just slipped out of his grasp, years further away into the future.

If he can’t convince the Department of Justice that his case is “exceptional and compelling” and they turn it down, Emon said, he’ll have to wait not just three years now from when he was granted protection – but five.  

That’s because he’d count as a new applicant and has to apply under new stringent rules. 

He is worried about how his relationship can endure the distance, he said. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen to our relationship.”