Our Children’s Citizenship Pro Bono Service, run as part of KIND UK, provides free legal services to children and young people to secure British citizenship.
At Coram Children’s Legal Centre (CLCC) we partner with four global law firms Allen and Overy, Baker McKenzie, DLA Piper, and Skadden Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom to provide free legal services to children and young people who would otherwise be unable to access legal support due to the unavailability of legal aid. The service assists children and young people in the UK to apply for and enjoy British citizenship.
The service addresses the huge gap between the tens of thousands of children and young people with a legal entitlement to apply for British citizenship and the number of children who apply in practice.
An award-winning project
In 2015, CCLC and its partner firms developed a different model from that historically seen in the UK. Instead of providing capacity for one-off advice clinics, the project takes on cases and provides end-to-end representation. Casework is carried out by volunteer lawyers from the partner firms who are trained and supervised by specialist immigration solicitors at CCLC. This innovation led to the service winning the prestigious Law Works award for most effective pro bono partnership in 2015 and CSR Innovation at the 2016 Legal Week Innovation Awards.
Our wider collaboration
Since 2018, this work has been part of the Kids In Need of Defense UK (KIND UK) collaboration. We work alongside four UK based not for profits that also specialise in children’s immigration and asylum law: Central England Law Centre, Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit, Just Right Scotland and Migrant and Refugee Children’s Legal Unit (at Islington Law Centre) to support and develop this pro bono model of legal representation reaching as many children, young people and their families as possible, across the UK.
For further details of the work we do, please see the KIND UK website.
Referrals
To refer a child or young person to our pro bono service for assistance with a British citizenship application, please complete our online referral form here.
