Solving `Passport Application` with Haskell

For the benefit of anyone else doing this in Japan, these are the documents I had to submit. It will be different depending on circumstance, in particular I think the author may also be born outside the UK which may require other/more documents.

Anyway I had to submit:

Certified copy of my birth certificate, order from the UK general register office.

Original (not photocopy) of Japanese family register and translation.

Certificate of acceptance of notification of birth, original and translation.

Original Marriage certificate and translation.

Colour photocopy of every page of my childs Japanese passport.

Copy photocopy of the passport of an American or British citizen who confirms that child is mine.

The process is pretty unclear, and in general you seem to have to just keep submitting documents until they are satisfied.

> I think the author may also be born outside the UK which may require other/more documents

In fact `applicant's father` (me) was born in the UK in this case, but `applicant's father's father` was not, the cause of the extra complications.

> Colour photocopy of every page of my childs Japanese passport.

But why?

Don't know in this case, but some other countries ask for it to deduce your travel history (any current passport itself goes to them, with color copies of every page of old passports). Qatar wanted it because I shared name with somebody born 40 years before me.

Interesting. Just out of curiosity: did you naturalize as a Qatari (didn’t even know it was possible!), or was it a visa-related thing?

I have to wonder how they would handle cases where a person doesn't have a legal father at all.

I just looked it up. I was dating a Qatari and didn't even dare to explore naturalization. The process is insane. As a man, you can't get citizenship through marriage (only women get that). So, as a guy I would have to live there for 25 continuous years with little time outside the country. Add on that they require you to be rich, Muslim and speak Gulf Arabic at native level. Also, you have to give up your birth citizenship (not always possible) and they can revoke your citizenship on a whim.

Qatar is a fascinating country, though.

If you don't have a legal father then you can't claim British citizenship through your father. That's all pretty straightforward. (Although there's a fun case where you can claim citizenship by double descent because your ancestor wasn't able to claim citizenship because of sexist historical laws).

That’s interesting, no requirement for parental birth certificates?

I was asked to provide (I am British, wife is Hungarian, living in Hungary) both parents’ birth certificates and all four grandparents’ birth certificates.

My wife is not in touch with her father, so we had to submit a cover letter explaining the situation, which was accepted (although I don’t really see why it was relevant anyway, my son’s Britishness is derived from my Britishness, her nationality and the nationality of her parents is essentially irrelevant).

We also didn’t have to copy the passport of anyone else, but we did have to have a family friend do the confirmation online (family friend is a lawyer in the UK, so was on the list of approved jobs for this).

> although I don’t really see why it was relevant anyway, my son’s Britishness is derived from my Britishness, her nationality and the nationality of her parents is essentially irrelevant

This is essentially happened to me, the "75% of the initial doc requests turned out to be irrelevant" was referring to this sort of thing.

No, I can't ever. I was an immigrant worker there, and Qatar Immigration wanted all this before they give me work visa aka residence permit.

Another reason is that the UK forbids the child to have different names on their japanese passport and their UK passport, which is often (almost always?) the case

:(

Weirdly this never came up for me (and I'm in a similar situation). I suspect what documents are ask for varies a lot by who is assessing the application.

Hope it all works out!

Parent of applicant but not grandparents, at least in my case.

In my case, as a British citizen married to a European living outside the UK, I had way fewer requests/demands for documentation.

All I needed to do was submit my own details, and a copy of both the marriage certificate and birth certificate for the child.

The assumption was made that as a married couple the child had me as the father, and as I'm British then so were they.

No references at all to grandparents, or even the mother's details, in the online wizard I filled out. Quite a quick process, which reminds me I probably need to renew their UK passport since it has expired a couple of years back.

Were you born before 1983? It seems that makes it easier

Maybe that's the difference, but yes I was.