2017] Citizenship Stripping Laws in the UK, Canada and Australia 43 drone strikes shortly after being stripped of their UK citizenship.214 While this may be mere coincidence, revoking a person’s citizenship absolves a country from any responsibility for their fate. Where citizenship revocation has the potential to render a person stateless, as in the UK, this danger is exacerbated, as affected individuals may be in a situation where they are not afforded protection by any country. Ben Emmerson, the UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights, noted this in evidence to the UK Joint Committee on Human Rights. He said that stateless individuals are placed at ‘a very substantial disadvantage’ as they have no recourse to ‘diplomatic protection’ and ‘no right[s] of entry or abode’.215 Emmerson stressed that this inherent vulnerability is made worse when the reason an individual is rendered stateless is that they are suspected of involvement in terrorism.216 In a world where national security measures are typified by wide executive discretion with sometimes inadequate oversight, the absolution from accountability for an individual facilitated by citizenship stripping is a cause for concern. Finally, the trend towards citizenship stripping has the potential to have negative consequences for international relations and for national security ventures on a broader scale. Efforts to permanently offload unwanted or high-risk citizens onto foreign states is likely to produce tensions between governments, as well as undermine the cohesion needed to tackle cross-jurisdictional security issues. It is also significant that the effect of nations such as the UK, Canada and Australia revoking citizenship may be to cast responsibility for dangerous individuals onto nations with far fewer resources or capacity to deal with them. Indeed, the measure may even strengthen the hand of terrorist organisations. People who might return home to face prosecution may instead be left at large overseas, perhaps with nowhere to go but to remain with Islamic State or another terrorist group.217 These factors illustrate that the laws enacted in the three jurisdictions surveyed, and that remain in place in the UK and Australia, threaten the rule of law and human rights and, in some ways, undermine the security objectives 214 See, eg, Chris Woods and Alice Ross, ‘Former British Citizens Killed by Drone Strikes after Passports Revoked’, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (London, 27 February 2013) <www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/02/27/former-british-citizens-killed-by-dronestrikes-after-passports-revoked/>, archived at <https://perma.cc/8822-HMCJ>. 215 Joint Committee on Human Rights, Uncorrected Transcript of Oral Evidence: Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights (House of Commons Paper No 1202, Session 2013–14) 22. 216 Ibid. 217 See, eg, Clubb (n 206); Saul (n 206). Advance Copy