JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN STUDIES  29 to incorporate large numbers of migrants present on their territories (Howard 2010; Joppke 2010). British and French political and parliamentary debates concerning citizenship deprivation highlight fears that by making citizenship acquisition easier and relaxing dual nationality rules, national citizenship becomes lighter and loses its exceptionality. In these cases, making it easier to lose citizenship becomes the reverse side of ‘citizenship-light’ as a way to reassure native populations of citizenship’s worth (Home Office 2002; Mantu 2015, 182; 249). Focusing on France, Kingston (2005, 24) argues that we are witnessing a new way of conceptualizing state power since depriving individuals of their citizenship status is a form of penal sanction to be applied to citizens in response to perceived crimes against public security by act or association. The symbolic deployment of citizenship deprivation powers to deal with dangerous citizens and police the boundaries of the nation can also be discussed in light of their historical use to question the citizenly credentials of naturalized citizens and of citizens with a foreign background during politically or economically unstable times (Mantu 2015, 339). This allows for a discussion of such powers as part of the design of modern nationality legislations and embedded in the configuration of citizenship (as both legal status and belonging) in relation to an inclusion/exclusion binary. Their analysis suggests a complex picture in which citizenship deprivation targeting dual nationals and citizens with an immigrant background points toward interlinkages between migration, asylum, and notions of (in)security, which should help us examine critically the claim that citizenship deprivation is primarily linked to counter-terrorism strategies. This article moves away from normative discussions concerning the legitimacy of citizenship deprivation in liberal democracies. Instead, the focus is on the legal configuration of the human right to nationality and its impact on attempts to change nationality laws in the UK and France to make it easier for the executive to deprive of citizenship on national security grounds. The argument it puts forwards is that ‘terrorist’ citizens enjoy the right to a nationality and that state measures stripping them of their status must comply with legal standards developed to protect this right. Although nationality is seen as part and parcel of state sovereignty, states do not enjoy unrestricted powers when it comes to the regulation of their nationality laws. As members of the international community of states, the UK and France are bound by jus cogens norms applicable in the field of nationality and by any other multilateral or bilateral agreements they have entered into addressing nationality and human rights issues. The interplay between international legal standards concerning nationality and the national practice of citizenship deprivation powers in France and the UK shows both the limits and success of regulating nationality issues at supranational levels. The human right to nationality The power of the state to take away nationality needs to be examined in light of the human right to nationality. Since a state’s nationality decisions will produce legal effects within its own internal order as well as at the international level, states have acknowledged the need to agree on a modicum of nationality standards that shape their powers to act in this field (Kesby 2012; Spiro 2011). In the current state of development of international law, citizenship deprivation is not per se arbitrary since states are entitled to withdraw nationality against the wishes of the person concerned, provided that certain legal safeguards are respected. These safeguards stem from a variety of sources adopted at international, regional and national levels. They include human rights obligations, such as the prohibition of arbitrary deprivation