Meijers Committee standing committee of experts on international immigration, refugee and criminal law origins. The associated policies and their effects are incompatible with international human rights principles of equality and non-discrimination.’94 Lastly, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has warned in its Guidelines on Statelessness that ‘States should take steps to ensure that the practical effect of withdrawal of nationality is not that certain groups (e.g. ethnic or religious minorities) are disproportionately affected […].’95 The UNHCR stressed that compliance with standards against statelessness alone is not enough and that states should equally respect the prohibition of discrimination.96 Summary This paragraph has analysed guarantees against discrimination at the levels of the EU, the Council of Europe and the United Nations. Discrimination on the grounds of nationality is prohibited both in EU law (Art. 21(2) CFR) and under the ECHR. These provisions can be interpreted to cover distinctions between single and dual nationals. Distinctions between single and dual nationals can also amount to indirect discrimination on the grounds of racial or ethnic origin as prohibited under the ECHR and the CERD. It follows from ECtHR case law (Biao v. Denmark) that this will be the case where distinctions between citizens predominantly affect citizens of foreign ethnic origin. Such distinctions require very weighty reasons in order to be justified. The UN Special Rapporteur on Racism has explicitly qualified the Dutch policy on denationalisation of (suspected) terrorists, which applies only to dual nationals, as a form of racial discrimination incompatible with the CERD. 7. Citizenship deprivation of dual nationals in the light of the prohibition of (racial and ethnic) discrimination As mentioned in the introduction, this policy brief originates in the concern that differential treatment of dual nationals undermines equal citizenship and results in de facto discrimination on the grounds of racial or ethnic origin. Paragraphs 3 to 5 elaborated on current practices of citizenship deprivation in relation to terrorism, which presently constitute an important source of inequality for persons with dual or multiple nationality. Although persons who are deprived of their citizenship on this ground constitute only a very small group of the population of the countries concerned, the act of citizenship deprivation has farreaching consequences and is likely to send a powerful signal to a much larger group of dual nationals that their citizenship is not secure. In paragraph 6 we assessed to what extent existing legal provisions on non-discrimination apply to situations of differential treatment of single and dual nationals as well as to indirect forms of racial and ethnic discrimination. In this paragraph we apply the said provisions to the case of dual nationals who are deprived of their nationality after being convicted for, or 94 Report of a Visit to the Netherlands, 2 July 2020, A/HRC/44/57/Add2, par. 60 at p. 12. UNHCR Guidelines on Statelessness No. 5, ‘Loss and Deprivation of Nationality under Articles 5-9 of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness’, UN Doc. HCR/GS/20/05 of May 2020, para 111. 96 Idem paras 24, 109 and 111. 95 18