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Melbourne University Law Review
[Vol 41(2):Adv
citizen after their return to the UK, such as reporting to police and attending
a deradicalisation program.83 Where a citizen subject to a TEO is deported
from a foreign country to the UK, the TEO scheme does not authorise their
exclusion.84 Moreover, where ‘the Secretary of State considers that [such an]
individual is to be deported to the United Kingdom’, a permit to return must
be issued.85
It is not clear that the Home Secretary’s citizenship deprivation powers add
significantly to the protection against security threats that is already achievable
via these other broad exclusionary controls. This is especially so because the
majority of citizenship revocations are issued while a citizen is overseas,86 such
that a TEO could be used to prevent or manage their return to the UK. Notably,
citizenship revocation seems to be employed more frequently than the TEO
scheme, which Prime Minister Theresa May and Home Secretary Amber Rudd
recently admitted had only been used once since its enactment.87 This may be
because denationalisation provides a more straightforward means to permanently exile a high-risk citizen from the UK. However, it is not clear that exile
serves the UK’s security needs better than the conditional managed return
scheme implemented via the CTSA. For instance, as Jessie Blackbourn and
Clive Walker have suggested, discouraging the voluntary return of citizens
deemed to be security risks carries with it the danger of such individuals adopting terrorism as a way of life, which opens up further risks that they may contribute to the escalation of foreign conflicts or seek to instigate terrorist attacks
in the UK from overseas.88 Certainly, in the lead-up to each expansion of the
UK’s denationalisation powers, no considered justification for prioritising permanent removal as an anti-terror tool was articulated.
It might also be argued that citizenship stripping avoids the problem of having to admit an excluded citizen who is deported to the UK by a foreign country
— a feature of the TEO scheme that some commentators have described as a
83
Ibid s 9.
84
Ibid s 2(1)(b).
85
Ibid s 7(1).
86
Ross and Galey (n 41).
87
Peter Walker, ‘Rudd Admits Anti-Terror Exclusion Powers Used Only Once since 2015’, The
Guardian (London, 29 May 2017) <www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/may/29/uk-usedanti-terror-exclusion-powers-once-since-2015-amber-rudd-admits>, archived at <https://
perma.cc/V3CR-FCS8>; Fiona Hamilton and Lucy Fisher, ‘Jihadist Ban: Theresa May Says Use
of Temporary Exclusion Orders Is “a Matter for Police”’, The Times (London, 30 May 2017)
<www.thetimes.co.uk/article/may-defends-single-use-of-jihadist-ban-dnxnqr6p3>, archived
at <https://perma.cc/F48Z-CCC9>.
88
Blackbourn and Walker (n 80) 852.
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