Meijers Committee standing committee of experts on international immigration, refugee and criminal law between Syria and Iraq. Retroactive application is not permitted. So far, no deprivation decision has been taken on this new ground. In the UK, the Home Secretary took deprivation decisions in 36 cases on the ground that deprivation was “conducive to the public good” between 2006 and 2015. Under Theresa May, serving as Home Secretary from 2010 to 2016, the number of deprivation decisions increased considerably. From 2010 until February 2020 about 150 British nationals were deprived of their nationality on those grounds.48 The available evidence suggests that most of those deprived were citizens originally from Muslim-majority countries. Not all deprivation decisions were taken on terrorism related grounds.49 From the above it appears that in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and the UK the provisions on withdrawal are applied in practice, but not in Germany although this may be due to the fact that the provision was only introduced in 2019. The number of withdrawals varies between 14 during three decades in France and 150 over the last ten years in the UK. The available evidence suggests that the new deprivation grounds are applied primarily or almost exclusively to persons who or whose parents originate from majority Muslim countries. For the Netherlands this comes as no surprise as by law only membership of Al Qa’ida, ISIS, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and related organisations may result in deprivation of nationality without a final criminal conviction. In the Netherlands, most deprivation decisions were taken in the absence of a final criminal conviction. In the UK, the deprivation ground used in most cases (“conducive to the public good”) is not contingent on a criminal conviction. The recent numbers of withdrawals are far lower than the (tens of) thousands of citizens who were deprived of their nationality before, during or shortly after the Second World War in NaziGermany and Vichy-France (concerning Jewish citizens) or in Canada and the USA (concerning citizens of Japanese descent). 5. Political and legal debate in France and Germany In countries with a history of withdrawal of nationality of specific ethnic groups - Jewish citizens, during the Nazi regime in Germany, and the Vichy government in France - recent proposals introducing new grounds for withdrawal triggered a principled debate. In other countries, such as the UK and the Netherlands, that debate started mainly after the new rules were applied in practice. Debates in France The current rules on deprivation of French nationality after a criminal conviction for terrorist acts in Article 25 of the Code Civil were introduced in 1996, after the attacks by an Algerian extremist group in Paris and other cities in 1995. This provision applies only to citizens who acquired French nationality later in life (by naturalisation or declaration) and, originally, only 48 House of Commons Briefing Paper 06820 of 9 June 2017 and Secretary of State Sajid Javid in the House of Commons on 20 February 2020, c1485. 49 M.J. Gibney, ‘Denationalisation and discrimination’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 46:12 (2020), p. 2551-2568, DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2018.1561065. 9