Could President Obama be British? Probably not
The ad says Obama does not have the parental credentials to stand as president, but the US constitution disagrees
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Wednesday, 02, Dec 2009 08:54
By Emmeline Saunders
Barack Obama is a British citizen and therefore is not eligible to serve as a US president, an advert in the Washington Post stated yesterday.
Alongside a plethora of conspiracy theories swarming the internet, the ad, in association with a website set up to "remove the usurper", alleges that Obama is not an "Article II natural born citizen".
Article II, the clause covering presidential eligibility in the US constitution, requires both a child's parents to be American citizens at the time of birth for the child to be a "natural born" citizen, the website insists.
But the constitution actually states: "No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall be eligible to the office of president."
This means the original nationality of an American child's parents does not impact on citizenship if the child is born in the US.
President Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr, was a Kenyan native. Kenya was still a British colony and part of the UK's diminishing empire by the time Barack Jnr was born. Obama Sr was therefore a British subject under the British Nationality Act 1948, which also governed the citizenship status of his offspring.
Barack Jr was born on August 4th 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, and as such was both a US citizen and a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies (UKC) because he was born to a father who was a UKC subject.
However, the boy who became president lost his British citizenship when Kenya formally gained its independence from Britain on December 11 1963.
He had dual citizenship of Kenya and the US until the age of 23, when Kenya's constitution stipulates Kenyan citizens who possess citizenship in more than one country automatically lose their Kenyan nationality.
Unless they formally renounce any non-Kenyan citizenship and swear an oath of allegiance to Kenya, they are no longer seen as citizens of Kenya.
As Obama did neither of these things, his Kenyan citizenship expired in 1984, leaving him in possession of full US citizenship.
The advert is the latest in a series of conspiracy rumours, seeking company with theories that the president's birth certificate has been altered, that Obama is a Muslim and even that his bestselling book Dreams From My Father was ghost-written.