By EUDO CITIZENSHIP Expert Helena Wray
The British Nationality Act 1981, s.40 was amended by the Immigration Asylum and Nationality Act 2006, s.56, to allow the Secretary of State by order to deprive a dual national British citizen of their citizenship if it is considered conducive to the public good, a criterion borrowed from deportation law. This power of deprivation extends to those who are citizens by birth, provided they have another nationality and so are not rendered stateless, meaning not only naturalised citizens but those of migrant descent are more likely to be vulnerable to deprivation in a way that does not affect the rest of the population.
The government has usually waited until the person concerned is outside the UK before serving notice of the deprivation order at the UK address. The subject of the order may only discover their predicament when attempting to re-enter the UK. The consequence is that appeal rights have to be exercised from outside the UK, even assuming they find out about the order within the 28 day period for appealing.
These appeals are difficult to conduct from a distance; they are almost always certified as involving security or foreign policy issues and are heard by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission in secret and with non-disclosure to the appellant of evidence against them. If deprivation is upheld, as is usually the case, the UK is spared the practical and legal difficulties of removing the newly foreign national who otherwise could rely on human rights defences to removal. The absence of a right to enter the UK for an appeal against deprivation was upheld by the Court of Appeal in R. (on the application of G1 (Sudan)) v SSHD [2012] EWCA Civ 867 (Read the judgment).
This drastic power is being used at an accelerating rate in the UK. 19 British nationals have been stripped of their citizenship since 2007, sixteen of them since 2010, compared to only 2 for the five year period between 2002 and 2007. Of the deprivations since 2007, two appeals have succeeded on statelessness grounds although the government is appealing them and one has succeeded on other grounds. Two of those deprived have been killed by drone strikes and one was seized by the FBI and rendered to the US before he could appeal. Five of those deprived of their nationality in this way were born in the UK. Some others have lived here since infancy or childhood.
In almost all cases, there has been no attempt to test the allegations against the victims through criminal proceedings for terrorist or other offences. Their predicament has been described the immigration lawyer Gareth Pierce as akin to medieval exile and it is not hard to understand why.
Read press articles on:
– The Bureau of Investigative Journalism: When being born British isn’t enough and ‘Medieval Exile’: The 21 Britons stripped of their citizenship
Read also an article by EUDO CITIZENSHIP expert Caroline Sawyer: “Civis Britannicus sum” no longer? Deprivation of British nationality” Journal of Immigration Asylum and Nationality Law 27(1) 23-40.