2022 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 4(2) The Supreme Court regarded the fee for children who apply for British citizenship as both unaffordable for many young people or their families34 and not touching any fundamental or constitutional right. Rather, it was ‘a question of policy which is for political determination’ and ‘not a matter for judges for whom the question is the much narrower one of whether Parliament has authorised the Secretary of State to set the impugned fee at the level which it has been set’.35 The ECHR art 8 right — incorporated into domestic law by the Human Rights Act 1998 — is shown to have significant weaknesses when stretched to address the essentially public questions of the conditions for the obtaining (or loss) of citizenship and/or the civil rights and entitlements attached to it, weaknesses that tend to highlight the absence of other, more specific protection for nationality rights in ECHR.36 These features of the instant decision arguably highlight both the desirability of further discussion regarding heightened protection of such conditions as a constitutional right and also the substantial obstacles to implementing greater safeguards for the acquisition of nationality in a common law system. 34 35 36 PRCBC SC (n 5) [5]. ibid [33], [51]. Article 8 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, (‘ECHR’) has been the preferred route of the European Court of Human Rights for a gradual development of principles relating to citizenship in the absence of more specific ECHR protection: Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, opened for signature 4 November 1950, ETS No.005 (entered into force 3 September 1953). See, eg, Usmanov v Russia (European Court of Human Rights, Application No 43936/18, 22 March 2021). The potential application of the ECHR art 3 prohibition of degrading treatment, for instance, has long been ignored by the Court, despite at least some precedent for application (in the context of citizenship and/or immigration laws undermined by race discrimination) in the decision of the then European Commission of Human Rights in East African Asians v United Kingdom [1973] 3 EHRR 67. 308