Sixteen-year-old Stefan Omar Nicholas Lee will be travelling to Britain next month. It won’t be his first time in that country, but the trip will be special nonetheless, because it will mark his return to his homeland after facing the prospect of being stranded in Jamaica.

According to his mother, Carol Soares, the British High Commission in Jamaica granted Stefan an emergency visa, allowing him to return to Britain after she complained that a British immigration technicality forced her to leave him here in April.

“They gave him an emergency visa that will allow him to travel into the country,” Soares told the Observer last week after the newspaper reported on her plight two Sundays ago. “And when we get back into the country we will have to sort out their requirements. We will be leaving Jamaica on the 15th of October.”

Jamaican-born Soares had taken her son, who was born and raised in England, to Jamaica in March in order for him to learn about the island.

The boy had travelled to Jamaica without a passport, using only his birth certificate and pictures as recommended by British authorities in England.

According to Soares, when she had tried to get a British passport for Stefan, she was told that he was Jamaican and therefore could not be issued with a British passport.

Soares said that she was advised that under the British Nationality Law, passed in 1983, children born in the UK to non-British citizens cannot acquire British citizenship unless they can satisfy the requirements of a bureaucratic principle termed ‘patriality’.

Under patriality, a passport holder has to be born and naturalised in the UK, or have a parent or grandparent who was born, adopted, or naturalised in the UK.

After spending just over a month in Jamaica, Soares and her son, on trying to return to Britain on April 27, were told at the Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston that Stefan could not travel back to Britain on the documents he used for entry.

She was forced to remain here and find accommodations for him and just over a week later returned to England to try and sort out the problem. She didn’t have any luck there, so she eventually flew back to Jamaica on August 31 to plead her case at the British High Commission.

Last week, she told the Observer that she was satisfied with the result of her lobby.

“It’s a better result than what would have happened had I not done anything, had I not come to the media,” she said.