On the Right to Have Nationality Rights: Statelessness,… 309 foreigners without status can, in principle, claim a long menu of basic human rights under international law and many domestic legal orders. But this rejoinder overlooks one crucial fact. The exercise of virtually all rights depends on territorial presence within the state, and only citizens have an unqualified right to enter and remain on state territory. So once stripped of the right to enter and remain in the state, enforcement means that one is effectively deprived of all the other rights that depend (de jure or de facto) on territorial presence.35 As pioneer in this area, the UK serves as an appropriate example.36 Thus, the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 introduced a general power for the Home Secretary to deprive a person of their citizenship status if satisfied that this person had acted in ways seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the UK, where for the first time this power applied to birthright as well as naturalized citizens, but where the power would not apply if deprivation would make the person de jure stateless. This criterion was further altered in section 56 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 to that of allowing deprivation if this is ‘conducive to the public good’. Denaturalisation policy was further extended in the Immigration Act 2014 in which dual citizens remained subject to the 2006 criterion, but naturalized citizens currently possessing only UK nationality were subject to a new standard in which they could be deprived of citizenship if: (a) the Secretary of State is satisfied that the deprivation is conducive to the public good because the person, when a British citizen, ‘has conducted him or herself in a manner which is seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the United Kingdom’ or associated territories; and (b) the Secretary of State has ‘reasonable grounds for believing that the person is able, under the law of a country or territory outside the United Kingdom, to become a national of such country or territory’.37 This is held to be compatible with the UK’s international obligations.38 From 2011 to 2015, following due legal process, 72 UK citizens were stripped of their citizenship. The fundamental issue raised by the cases of the Dominican Republic and the UK, given that in both cases the denaturalisation practices introduced complied with the normal standards of due legal process in these states, concerns what constitutes an arbitrary deprivation of one’s nationality. This question has particular purchase today since our situation is complicated by the relative collapse of the norm of single nationality which facilitates citizenship deprivation insofar as the state’s exercise of this power does not entail breaching the norm against de jure statelessness. 35 Macklin (2014), p. 2. For an overview, see McGuinness and Gower (2017) and Anderson (2016). 37 Anderson (2016), p. 3. 38 Anderson (2016), p. 5. 36 123