4 Melbourne University Law Review [Vol 41(2):Adv and that this requires a legislative response. The security rationale is based on the idea that these undesirable citizens may pose a threat to national security and that managing this risk of harm warrants removing them from the citizenry and, where possible, from the nation itself. By contrast, the symbolic rationale is less grounded in pragmatic considerations. It asserts that certain members of the citizenry do not deserve to hold citizenship, irrespective of whether or not the fact that they hold it presents an increased risk of harm. In this article, we examine the efficacy of the recent moves to legislate for citizenship stripping in the UK, Canada and Australia in light of these stated goals. In Part II, we outline recent citizenship stripping legislation enacted in each of the three countries, and situate this in the context of other national security laws. We then seek to determine the extent to which expanding the grounds for citizenship stripping has served the security and symbolic justifications that the government in each country supplied in support of this move. In doing so, we recognise the limitations of our analysis. It is not possible to undertake a comprehensive assessment of the efficacy of these laws given our lack of access to intelligence and other sensitive information. It is also not possible to measure empirically the contribution that they have made to national security. Instead, we examine the extent to which the expanded citizenship stripping laws serve security justifications by looking at publicly available information about the use of such laws, as well as the extent to which they cover the same ground as other national security legislation. A significant development that has occurred since this article was written is that the Canadian denationalisation legislation that we analyse has been repealed, just three years after its enactment.8 Interestingly, the decision to repeal this legislation, much like the decision to introduce it, appears to have been underpinned by a symbolic rationale: in this case one that emphasises the security of citizenship as a status, irrespective of the ‘deservingness’ of each individual citizen. Our analysis has been updated to take account of and to reflect upon this. In Part III, we identify and explore some key themes that arise out of the cross-jurisdictional analysis conducted in Part II. The resurrection of denationalisation powers in the UK, Canada and Australia forms part of a broader global trend towards invoking citizenship stripping as a response to national security 8 See Bill C-6, An Act to Amend the Citizenship Act and to Make Consequential Amendments to Another Act, 1st Sess, 42nd Parl, 2016 (‘Bill C-6’), amending Citizenship Act, RSC 1985, c C-29, s 10(2) (‘Canadian Citizenship Act’). Advance Copy