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L. van Waas, S. Jaghai
invoke this measure. On the other hand, a mono citizen may be subject to the withdrawal of his or her British citizenship only if it was acquired by naturalisation and
if two additional conditions are met: that ‘it would be conducive to the public good
to deprive them of their status because they have engaged in conduct “seriously prejudicial” to the UK’s vital interests’ and that ‘the Home Secretary has reasonable
grounds to believe that they could acquire another nationality’.36 The nationality of
a mono citizen who is British by birth remains secure, regardless of his or her conduct. This legislation alone generates three ‘classes’ of British citizenship in terms
of the security of status. Were three British citizens—one a mono citizen by birth,
one a naturalised mono citizen and one a dual citizen—to conspire together to commit a terrorist act, the availability to the state of nationality deprivation as a recourse
would differ among them, even if they were all equally culpable.
In this age of securitisation of nationality policy, it is dual nationals that are particularly affected. In Britain, there has been a significant upsurge in the deprivation
of citizenship. In the 7 years from 2010 to 2016, a total of 47 people were stripped
of their citizenship on the basis that to do so was ‘conducive to the public good’,
then in 2017 this shot up to 104 people in a single year.37 All were dual nationals.
In other countries where laws have been reformed in recent years, safeguards have
been built into avoid statelessness—protecting the citizenship of mono citizens from
interference, while revocation cases were initiated against dual nationals even as the
ink was drying on the newly expanded deprivation powers. For instance, the media
reported on the use of deprivation of citizenship against four ‘convicted jihadists’ by
the Netherlands in 2017, a ‘convicted terrorist’ by Belgium in 2018 and five ‘IS terrorists’ by Australia in 2018.38 Again, all were dual nationals.
The upshot of this new trend in law and practice is the creation of ‘a category of
individuals who are placed under a special regime because they are considered to be
undeserving of the same level of legal protection as other individuals’.39 Targeting
dual nationals, and in some cases specifically naturalised citizens, opens a pathway
to indirect discrimination against minorities. In most countries, people from ethnic
and religious minorities are over-represented in the population that holds naturalised
citizenship or dual nationality. In the Netherlands, for instance, the majority of dual
nationals are Dutch-Moroccans—who also, in fact, experience difficulties renouncing their Moroccan citizenship and so may be unable to become mono Dutch
36
British Nationality Act 1981 (as amended on 28 July 2014), Sect. 40(2). Note that the introduction of
this rule in 2014 was met with significant criticism as the clause allows for the possibility of rendering a
British citizen stateless. In practice, however, the last of the three requirements is unlikely to be fulfilled
in a situation where a person is subject to deprivation of nationality due to conduct seriously prejudicial
to the vital interests of a state. Such conduct will render the individual ineligible for naturalisation, due
to common prescriptions relating to good conduct. As such, the utility of this provision is questionable.
37
Bureau of Investigative Journalism (2016); Secretary of State for the Home Department (2018), p. 27.
38
‘Vier Jihadisten Nederlander-Af’, 13 September 2017, https://www.bnr.nl/nieuws/politiek/10329596/
vier-jihadisten-nederlander-af; ‘Rechter ontneemt veroordeelde terrorist nationaliteit’, 14 June 2018,
http://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20180614_03561686; ‘Five terrorists involved with IS have been
stripped of their Australian citizenship’, 9 August 2018, https://www.sbs.com.au/news/five-terrorists
-stripped-of-australian-citizenship.
39
Burchardt and Gulati (2018), p. 218.
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