84 Brad K. Blitz born there) had right of abode. The 1981 British Nationality Act further reduced the rights of former British subjects. Commonwealth nationals now enjoyed one of six categories of British nationality: British citizens, British Overseas Territories citizens, British Overseas citizens, British Nationals (Overseas), British subjects, and British protected persons. Today, only British citizens and certain Commonwealth citizens have the automatic right of abode in the United Kingdom. Until the Windrush scandal of 2018,66 when dozens of former British subjects who had arrived before 1973 were wrongly detained and deported to Caribbean countries, the controversies regarding British nationality statuses attracted little public attention. It was inconceivable that former British subjects, including those with the status of CUKC, might suffer from the loss of nationality on UK soil. Rather, statelessness was considered a distant and understudied problem, more applicable to the former colonies in the Global South. A handful of legal cases and press reporting on crimes involving nationals from former British colonies, however, served as a reminder that individuals present on UK territory might also be caught between nationality statuses. One notable case involved a group of individuals who were unable to rely on the UK government to determine their status. In the summer of 2004, police and immigration officers arrested some refugee families in Oxford as part of “Operation Iowa.”67 The incident led to a criminal trial and inquiry that resulted in the cancellation of refugee status and withdrawal of state protection from the families, including the children. What complicated the matter was that the families concerned claimed not to be Pakistani, as reported, but from the disputed region of Kashmir, administered by India since 1954. Even though the United Kingdom has extensive official channels to the governments of India and Pakistan, all three states refused to rule on the status of the families. The nationality struggles facing Kashmiris are well documented. Those affected include more than 100,000 Punjabi refugees who fled to Jammu and Kashmir from neighboring Sialkot (now in Pakistan) in 1947, and whose descendants have been denied Indian citizenship ever since. The refugees who settled in Oxford claimed to be from Kashmir, although they had ties to Pakistan and their ancestral home was described as “Sialkot.” Their specific nationality status was brought to light when they were taken to court, where their rights to remain in the United Kingdom were called into question. In the 2005 criminal case, R v. Faruq and Others68 (Operation Iowa), the Crown Prosecution Service claimed that there had been a conspiracy to contravene the Immigration Act by bringing relatives into the United Kingdom under bogus pretenses and then falsely claiming asylum (on the grounds they were persecuted The name referred to the Empire Windrush, the ship that brought one of the first groups of West Indian migrants to the United Kingdom in 1948. 67 See C. Sawyer and B. K. Blitz (eds.), Statelessness in the European Union: Displaced, Undocumented, Unwanted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 68 R v. Faruq and Others (Operation Iowa) (2005) (unreported). 66 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press