Factsheet – Deprivation of citizenship sanction, within the meaning of Article 4 of Protocol No. 7 (right not to be tried or punished twice) of the Convention, and that this provision was therefore inapplicable. Usmanov v. Russia 1 22 December 2020 This case concerned a national of Tajikstan’s complaint about decisions to revoke his Russian citizenship and remove him from Russian territory. The applicant had been granted Russian citizenship in 2008, but it had been revoked ten years later when the authorities discovered that he had omitted the names of his brothers and sisters in his application. The applicant alleged that, in the decisions to revoke his Russian nationality and exclude him from Russia, the authorities had failed to duly take into account his family situation or to explain why he had posed a threat to national security. The Court held that there had been a violation of Article 8 of the Convention as concerned both the revocation of the applicant’s Russian citizenship and the decision to expel him from Russian territory, finding that, overall, it had not been convincingly established that the threat which the applicant had allegedly posed to national security had outweighed the fact that he had been living in Russia for a considerable period of time in a household with a Russian national, with whom he had four children, two of whom had been born in Russia. That was particularly relevant given that during his stay in Russia the applicant had not committed any offences. The Court noted in particular that the authorities’ decisions in the applicant’s case had been overly formalistic, failing to duly balance the interests at stake. In particular, they had not shown why the applicant’s failure to submit information about some of his siblings had been so grave that it was justified to deprive him of his Russian citizenship so many years after he had obtained it. Indeed, revoking the applicant’s citizenship for such an omission, without the authorities carrying out any kind of balancing exercise, had been grossly disproportionate. Johansen v. Denmark 1 February 2022 (decision on the admissibility) The applicant in this case was born in Denmark to a Danish mother and a Tunisian father and had dual nationality. The case concerned the stripping of his Danish nationality following his conviction in 2017 for terrorism offences, in particular for having gone to Syria to join the “Islamic State”. The authorities had also ordered his deportation from Denmark with a permanent ban on his return. The Court declared the application inadmissible, finding the applicant’s complaints about the stripping of the Danish nationality and his expulsion manifestly ill-founded. It noted in particular that the decisions concerning the applicant, who had dual Danish and Tunisian nationality, had been made after a thorough, diligent and swift assessment of his case, bearing in mind the gravity of his offences, his arguments and personal circumstances, the Court’s case-law and Denmark’s international obligations. The Court also emphasised that it was legitimate for Contracting States to take a firm stand against terrorism, which in itself constituted a grave threat to human rights. Emin Huseynov v. Azerbaijan (no. 2) 13 July 2023 This case concerned the applicant’s complaint about being deprived of his Azerbaijani citizenship in June 2015, making him stateless. At the time he was an independent journalist and the chairman of a non-governmental organisation specialising in the protection of journalists’ rights. He had just spent ten months in hiding in the Swiss embassy in Baku as he was on a wanted list in connection with criminal proceedings against his NGO concerning alleged financial irregularities, before leaving on a plane with the Minister of Foreign Affairs for Switzerland where he was granted asylum shortly afterwards. 1 . On 16 September 2022 the Russian Federation ceased to be a Party to the European Convention on Human Rights (“the Convention”). 3