6 CONCLUSION Recent years have seen a resurgence of states’ practices of nationality deprivation as security measure, repackaged for the 21st century as a counter-terrorism instrument. By comprehensively surveying legislative provisions in force today around the world and exploring the evolution of nationality deprivation powers since the year 2000, this report reveals the full extent of this resurgence for the first time. It confirms an alarming gravitation towards the securitisation of citizenship. Today, in almost 80% of countries around the world, citizens can be deprived of their citizenship based on disloyalty, military or other service to a foreign country or other criminal offences. These deprivation powers have increased significantly in the post-9/11 period. Since 2000, one in five countries have added new grounds for nationality deprivation that relate to disloyalty, national security or counter-terrorism – with Europe at the helm, closely followed by the MENA region. In a number of countries, such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, the cumulative effect of successive legislative amendments has been to expand powers, increase the scope of who can be targeted, bestow more discretion to the executive in the use of nationality deprivation and weaken procedural protections. The report also shows that when evolving state policy and practice is held up against international norms – synthesised in the Principles on Deprivation of Nationality as a National Security Measure – a variety of problems arise. International law protects the right to a nationality, prescribes the avoidance of statelessness and prohibits arbitrary or discriminatory deprivation of nationality, significantly constraining the freedom of states to instrumentalise the loss of nationality. This global survey shows that there is a high risk of arbitrariness and the violation of the principle of non-discrimination due to the framing of legislative powers. Two thirds of countries that deprive citizens of nationality due to disloyalty or treason target these powers only to certain categories of citizen (usually naturalised citizens), who are often from minority groups, increasing both direct and indirect discrimination and serving to bolster and justify racist, xenophobic and populist narratives. Moreover, the measure is often implemented without sufficient procedural protections or safeguards against statelessness. Three quarters of countries lack safeguards to prevent statelessness and many laws employ vague language, leaving the interpretation such clauses to the discretion of the authority in charge of taking deprivation decisions. This creates legal uncertainty and the possibility for powers to be ‘stretched’ and abused – as in the case of Bahrain where human rights defenders have been a prime target. Yet, a countertrend is also visible, with 15 countries either completely repealing or significantly limiting their deprivation powers during the same post 9/11 period. These countries, found mainly in the Americas and Asia Pacific region, demonstrate that political decisions to broaden deprivation powers are not irreversible. Canada presents a noteworthy example, where restrictive deprivation powers introduced in 2014 were reversed just three years later, in favour of pursing justice through the application of criminal law. These changes were ushered in under the leadership of 38 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who helped to underscore that while national security and counterterrorism remain serious concerns that need to be addressed, states have other tools to adequately respond without having to resort to nationality stripping. Today, there are 56 countries globally where nationality cannot be deprived on grounds relating to national security – including several where citizens are protected against involuntary loss of their nationality under the constitution. As discussed in this report, a number of countries (including Sweden and the Czech Republic) have resisted populist calls to instrumentalise citizenship in the fight against terrorism – favouring the use of criminal justice measures and steering away from a measure which hugely divisive and has, in any case, not proven to be effective. In fact, as more countries expanded citizenship stripping powers on the pretext of protecting national security or fighting terrorism, this generated concern not only among human rights mandate holders but also from the security sector. Such instrumentalisation of nationality deprivation threatens the international legal order and relations between states, by passing the problem of dealing with a possible security risk to another state instead of each state taking responsibility for its own citizens. Referring to Osama Bin Laden as “Exhibit A of the folly of stripping a foreign fighter’s citizenship and then washing your hands and assuming the individual is no longer your problem”,1 counter-terrorism experts warn that nationality deprivation will be counter-effective to security goals: blocking the return of people they regard as dangerous, “ By these states believe that they are protecting their citizens at home. In reality, however, this “hands off” stance will only create greater danger in the future […] The denial of citizenship by their home nations will bolster their sense of being, in effect, citizens of the Islamic State, potentially preparing them to form the core of a future resurgence. Similar conditions brought the modern Salafi jihadist movement into being in the first place”.2 A closer look, in this report, at a selection of individual cases, exposes a variety of complex outcomes following nationality deprivation, including: expulsion back to the country of former nationality; limbo in the country of former nationality due to obstacles to deportation; and burdening a third country, such as Turkey, because there is nowhere to send the denationalised person to. Perhaps already aware that citizenship stripping is not an easy 'fix'w to the complex challenge of combatting international terrorism, some states – such as in Central Asia – that introduced deprivation powers to address the perceived threat of ‘foreign fighters’ returning from Syria and Iraq, do not appear to have used these powers, instead focusing on repatriation, rehabilitation and de-radicalisation. Indeed, while the lack of reporting on data makes it hard to gauge how much the measure has actually been used, the few available statistics suggest that the numbers affected are low overall - cases are in the tens, or less, with the exception of Bahrain (434 cases) and the UK (212 cases).