nicgentile wrote:I always thought that when you became a refugee, you forsake the citizenship of your country. Hence, your passport of your country becomes null and void pending new documents being issued by your host country.
No, as noted above, the UK is not able to revoke a citizenship of another country that someone may hold.
In point of practice, people who are in the process of claiming refugee status or asylum usually find that their passports are held at the Home Office while their claim is looked into. If the claim is granted, their passports would normally be returned to them and, assuming that they have not expired and the issuing country has not revoked them, such passports remain valid documents for travel.
People who have claimed asylum cannot generally travel back to their country of origin without jeopardising their status in the UK while they remain refugees in the UK - perhaps that is what you're thinking of. There is, however, nothing in law or regulation or in practice to prevent such people from using their passports (if still valid) to travel to another, third country.
Once ILR has been granted, one could argue that their immigration status in the UK is no longer dependent (directly) on the asylum claim anyway. Even so, one could no doubt question the legitimacy of the original asylum claim if a person is prepared to travel back to the country of origin.
Having said that, though, situations do change with time, and countries that were once unstable and where once a person might have been in danger do, sometimes, regain a degree of stability. (Rwanda is one obvious case in point.) These sorts of changes over time are likely to be relevant quite often, given the lamentable delays in the Home Office dealing with aysum claims, certainly during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
