tilburg law review 19 (2014) 163-170 brill.com/tilr Citizenship Deprivation in the United Kingdom Statelessness and Terrorism Sandra Mantu PhD Candidate, Centre for Migration Law, Radboud University, Nijmegen s.mantu@jur.ru.nl Abstract The United Kingdom has amended its nationality legislation in order to make it easier for the state to exercise citizenship deprivation powers. The new powers target citizens who have engaged in behaviours labelled by the UK executive as not conducive to the public good. Statelessness operates as the outer limit of the government’s capacity to transform citizens into foreigners and plays an important role in limiting the exercise of executive powers. Keywords citizenship deprivation – statelessness – national security – terrorism 1 Introduction This contribution discusses the growing role played by statelessness in opposing citizenship deprivation orders taken by the UK executive on grounds of national security. The power of the Secretary of State for the Home Department to deprive British citizens of their status has taken centre stage among the statutory grounds of loss of citizenship, as the deprivation provisions have been substantially amended in 2002 and 2006. The reasons for which British citizens may lose their status have been widened and applied against an increasing number of persons.1 These changes were operated at a time when 1 There is no official information on the exact number of persons deprived of citizenship since 2002. Prior to 2002, the last case of citizenship deprivation was documented in 1974. According to data obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, between 2002 and February 2013, 21 persons were stripped of UK citizenship. See, C. Wood and A. Ross, ‘Medieval Exile: © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/22112596-01902016