London - Twins born to a British homosexual couple via a US surrogate mother have been refused the right to automatic residence in the United Kingdom, a newspaper reported on Sunday.
The Mail on Sunday said that British immigration authorities impounded the twins' American passports when they arrived at London's Heathrow airport and gave them temporary residence permits for a month to enable their fathers to regularise their status.
The two homosexuals, Barrie Drewitt, 32, and Tony Barlow, 35, millionaire businessmen living in Essex, southeast England, paid $320 000 for Rosalind Bellamy, already a mother of four, to bear the twins, a boy, Aspen, and a girl, Saffron.
She was implanted with two test-tube embryos conceived from the ova of an anonymous donor and the sperm of one of the two fathers.
For the first time, an American court agreed that the twins be registered as having two fathers and that no mention be made of the mother on their birth certificates.
The fathers, who have lived together for 11 years and who had tried in vain to adopt a child in the UK, returned to Britain from the United States last week with the two babies, who were born at the beginning of December.
Drewitt told the Mail: "We thought for one awful moment they were going to send the babies back to America.
"The Chief Immigration officer went off to phone the Home Office and came back and said 'We're not admitting the babies'. That sent us into a complete panic."
"Then he added that he was giving them one month's temporary stay and took their passports," Drewitt added.
The couple has written to the Home Office and to Prime Minister Tony Blair seeking permanent residence for the children.
A Foreign Office spokesman said: "We do not comment on individual cases. The immigration status of people arriving in Britain will be looked at as a matter of course.
"Under current legislation, a child must have one parent who is a British citizen in order to become a British citizen." - Sapa-AFP