MK (A Child By Her Litigation Friend CAE), R (On the Application O... 3 of 12 http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2017/1365.html 4. The issue, in short, is whether C, for the purposes of paragraph 3 of Schedule 2 to the 1981 Act, 'is and always has been stateless'. That will (or may) depend on the meaning of 'stateless' in the Act, which is a matter of law. It will in addition almost certainly turn on the question whether C is (or ever has been) a national of India. That will depend wholly or largely on Indian law, which in this court is a matter of fact and needs to be proved by evidence. Indian law 5. The need to prove Indian law by evidence appeared to take Mr Burrett rather by surprise. He put what he said were the relevant and up-to-date provisions of the Citizenship Act 1955 (India) before me as an authority, photocopied from some unidentified compendium of statutes (the copy incorporates some amendments to the Act and a few comments). He asked me to read, interpret, and assess the impact of the Indian legislation as though it were English legislation. 6. I cannot do that. The court is deemed to know the whole of English law and the relevant principles of interpretation, but it knows nothing of Indian law save as may be revealed by evidence. That is obvious if the situation were to be reversed. An Indian judge who had before him three sections of an English statute, apparently updated at some unknown stage, unaccompanied by any subordinate legislation, any decided cases, any contextual information or any material showing how the provisions impacted in practice could not be expected to form an accurate view of the relevant part of the English legal order. That is why it is normally necessary to have not merely evidence, but expert evidence, to prove foreign law. 7. There is no evidence in this case from anybody being put forward as an expert in Indian nationality law. What I do have is witness statements submitted by the defendant, setting out the experience of certain of her officers and the result of enquiries they have made. I understood Mr Burrett to suggest that I should not take very much notice of them – presumably either because they are not expert evidence, or because it is not for a non-lawyer to give evidence on the meaning or operation of the law, or because the meaning or operation of a statute, even an Indian statute, is not a matter for evidence. But the crucial features of the statements are not the subject of any contrary evidence. It seems to me that I am entitled to take them into account, not as a comprehensive statement of the relevant Indian law, but as evidence of its operation as observed by the makers of the statements. 8. So far as the Indian legislation is concerned, there is in fact agreement between the parties about its present form, and about what (if I may use the broad term) it says. The claimant seeks to leave the matter there and to draw conclusions from what it says. The defendant seeks to show that what it says is not the whole story. Although the state of the evidence on Indian law is clearly not what it might be, it is in my judgment appropriate to make findings of facts on the basis of it, and to proceed to determine this claim on the basis of those findings, for the following reasons. First, there is no dispute between the parties about the legal text to be applied: this is not, for example, a case where there is any doubt about whether there are statutory amendments that may or may not be in force and may or may not be reflected in the text before the court. Secondly, although there is no expert evidence there is evidence about the operation of the relevant provisions, which is not the subject of any counter-evidence and is not itself of a nature of which the court ought to be suspicious. It presents, as it were, what might be the 'bottom line' of an expert account, without showing the working: but where there is no proper basis for doubting the working, it is sufficient to support findings. Thirdly, given the nature of the present claim as a lead case, it may be assumed that the parties have done all they can to assemble material going to establish what the Indian law is, and it may therefore be further assumed that nothing very much better is going to be available in any other case. 9. Proceeding then on the basis of the material before me I find the following facts in relation to the relevant Indian law. Indian citizenship is acquired by descent, and a child born outside India after 1992 is a citizen of India by descent if either of the child's parents was at the time of his birth a citizen of India other than by descent. If, however, the birth was outside India on or after 3 20/05/2021, 15:49