When travelling with your children, but without the other parent, do you always bring a birth certificate and a letter of consent? Have you ever been given a hard time despite having a birth certificate? In theory these are needed to prevent child abduction, but I understand that one parent sharing the same surname is much less likely to be challenged, so these checks are b*! We were given a hard time in London because “birth certificates are easy to fake”!
Long story:
Italian documents (ID cards and passports) of minors clearly indicate the names of the parents or of those with parental responsibility; in the case of passports, dates and places of birth are shown, too. Note that Italian women CANNOT, by law, change their surname and take that of their husband; at most they can have it added to the ‘special observations’ section of their passports.
So our daughter has my same surname; my Italian wife does not. DD holds dual British – Italian citizenship.
Last time my wife travelled with our daughter, but, without me, an immigration officer at a London airport inspected DD’s British passport, and gave my wife a hard time because she “needed to prove she was the mother of the child”.
No worries, she thought, here is DD’s Italian passport, which clearly shows she is the mother.
But no, that was not good enough, because it was not a British document. Didn’t she have a British document, too?
As it happens, she did: DD’s birth certificate (she was born in England), which also clearly shows she’s the mother.
The officer inspected it, complained that “ birth certificates are easy to fake ”, quizzed her a bit more, and in the end, seemingly reluctantly, let them go.
It may be true that birth certificates are easy to fake, but what on Earth is someone supposed to provide? Some kind of notarised letter of consent from the other parent is often mentioned, but I believe that is easier to fake than an official observation on a EU passport.
We have now renewed DD’s British passport. In the application, we asked to include the name of both parents in the special observations section, just like the Italians do. The answer was no. Oh, well…
Btw, a similar thing happened in Italy: we were travelling with DD’s British documents only, the Italian immigration officer asked us to prove we were the parents, we gave him the British birth certificate, and he started telling us off claiming we should have brought her Italian passport with us. He said it was the law, but couldn’t answer when I asked which law!
Now we always travel with both the British and Italian passport, and if one of us travels with DD without the other parent, we get a notarised letter of consent. We are sort of resigned to the fact that it’s all too easy to get an immigration officer who’ll give us a hard time for his own, questionable, interpretation of the law, and we’d rather bring more documents and paperwork than strictly needed than waste time arguing with these people. All the more so if we ever travel to a country where we have no right of abode (eg the US), and where immigration officers have TOTAL, practically unquestionable discretion.
I understand that preventing child trafficking is very important, etc. etc., but giving a hard time because “birth certificates are easy to fake” without explaining what harder-to-fake documents should have been provided is ludicrous. Also, this was not a woman travelling to some remote destination with an infant of a different race – DD was old enough to cling to my wife and to confirm she was the mummy; were they going to refuse entry to a British citizen with right of abode in the country?
Also, for once we Italians do something right, certainly more sensible than the Brits! And don’t get me started on the British paranoia about ID cards: they’re a no-no because they might become compulsory, but your system effectively makes holding a more expensive passport compulsory: how do you prove citizenship without one? Windrush has shown you don’t!