Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 2018 VOL. 26, NO. 1, 28–41 https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2017.1397503 OPEN ACCESS ‘Terrorist’ citizens and the human right to nationality Sandra Mantu Centre for Migration Law, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands ABSTRACT Citizenship deprivation – the power of the state to take away citizenship against the wishes of the individual concerned – is gaining momentum among policy-makers and scholars. This interest is linked with changes introduced by a number of European states with a view to make it easier to take away citizenship from persons engaged in terrorist activities (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom). This article focuses on two such countries, the United Kingdom and France, which have changed their nationality legislations to make it easier to take away citizenship because it is deemed conducive to the public good (UK) or because the person concerned was convicted of a terrorist offence (France). Changes to citizenship deprivation powers were justified by national security concerns involving citizens engaged in terrorist activities at home and, increasingly, abroad. While home-grown terrorists and foreign ‘terrorist’ fighters pose a threat to national security, the use of nationality legislation to deal with them as security threats encroaches upon their human right to nationality. The British and French cases illustrate how far states can go in the exercise of citizenship deprivation powers, and to what extent human rights standards limit state powers of deprivation. KEYWORDS France; United Kingdom; national security; criminal; public good; statelessness; arbitrary Introduction Citizenship scholars have rediscovered citizenship deprivation after a relatively long period during which nationality acquisition and dual nationality have dominated research and public agendas. This interest is driven by legislative changes introduced by European states (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and UK), and has led to normative debates on the legitimacy and compatibility of citizenship deprivation powers with the principles that underpin liberal democracies (Bauböck and Paskalev 2015; Gibney 2012). Examining citizenship deprivation from the perspective of liberalism as the underlying political ideology of European states, Gibney (2012) argues that it highlights profound tensions between the values held by liberals and the individual’s right to citizenship somewhere. The resurgence of citizenship deprivation powers has been interpreted as the downside of liberal citizenship policies enacted by European states in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries CONTACT Sandra Mantu s.mantu@jur.ru.nl © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.