Opposing Powers to Strip British Citizenship

13 Feb 2014
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab): I am grateful for the opportunity to air this issue in the House this afternoon. Although the power to deprive British nationals of citizenship, amplified in clause 60 of the Immigration Bill, might seem to some a mere legal technicality, important issues lie behind it. Clause 60 is wrong-headed, and I hope that airing the issues this afternoon will lead people in another place to throw the clause out of the Bill.

The clause provides for the Secretary of State to render a person stateless by depriving him or her of their nationality where citizenship has been gained through naturalisation and where
“the Secretary of State is satisfied that the deprivation is conducive to the public good because the person, while having that citizenship status, has conducted him or herself in a manner which is seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the United Kingdom”.

First, I would remind the House that we are talking about terror suspects. Nowadays in Parliament, saying that someone is suspected of terrorist activity is enough for the political class to assume that that person does not deserve due process. It is worth reminding the House that those people have not actually been convicted of any crime. Sadly, I have to say, the currency of political debate about terrorism has been so debased, first under Tony Blair and now under the coalition, that alleged terrorists are now routinely deemed to be the only category of alleged criminal who are not allowed due process—even alleged paedophiles have to have due process, but not alleged terrorists.

My view is that if someone is suspected of terrorism, the obvious step is to put them on trial. I am supported in that view by no less a person than the late Lord Kingsland, the former Conservative shadow Lord Chancellor, who said in 2002:

“If we identify someone as a person proposing to commit a serious terrorist offence…surely the obligation is on us to deal with that person. If we simply deport him, we shall be handing on…this terrorist problem to another state which may not have the same capability of dealing with it…It cannot be a proper response to the terrorist threat to refuse to deal with it ourselves”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 9 October 2002; Vol. 639, c. 277-278.]

That was the view of the Conservative party in 2002, but clearly things have changed in the intervening time.

Being realistic, we know that the security services have always resisted trial for many suspected terrorists because—this is my understanding—they do not want to make public their wire-tapping and other surveillance methods. I have always found that argument dubious, and it is even less credible post the Snowden revelations, which have revealed to us all more about state surveillance than we ever wanted to know. Instead of due process, the security services and their political adherents in both parties prefer secret courts, detention without trial and now this attempt to strip away citizenship.

That leads me to one of the big problems with clause 60 of the Immigration Bill: it creates two different classes of British citizenship. There are those, such as myself, who are British citizens because we were born here, and there are those, including some of the people who work for me, who are British citizens by naturalisation. We will have two classes of British citizens. That is a dangerous road to go down. In support of that view I quote no less a person than the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), who, as I think most people know, is a Conservative MP and not someone who could be described as a bleeding-heart liberal. On Report, when clause 60 was added to the Immigration Bill, he said:

“I am perhaps rather romantic in my view of what it means to be a British subject. I always though that Palmerston got it right on the Don Pacifico affair—the ‘civis Romanus sum’ principle. Once any one of us has a passport that says we are British, we are as British as anybody else, whether they were born here or got their passport five minutes ago. It is incredibly important that there is equality before the law for all Her Majesty’s subjects who are living in this country and have right of residence here.

I worry that if we give the Government the ability to take passports away from a certain category of British subject but not from others, it will create a potential unfairness and a second category of citizen.”—[Official Report, 30 January 2014; Vol. 574, c. 1086.]

That goes to the heart of one of the problems with the legislation. We should not have, as it were, class A and class B British citizens. In communities such as mine, the fear will be that although this has started with suspected terrorists, where will it end, once the state decides that British citizenship is not indivisible? The Home Secretary has said, rather unfortunately, that citizenship is a privilege, not a right, but citizenship is not a privilege or a right; it is a fact. Deciding that it is not a fact and that the state can chop and change when it comes to the light in which it regards someone’s citizenship, is, I believe—as does the hon. Member for North East Somerset—a dangerous road to go down.

Another problem with the proposal is that in stripping a terrorism suspect of their nationality, there is a danger that we could render them stateless. That problem was raised on Report. The Secretary of State argued that

“we are talking about a situation in which they”—

that is, the person deprived of citizenship—

“would be able to acquire statehood from somewhere else.”—[Official Report, 30 January 2014; Vol. 574, c. 1040.]

However, even the most cursory glance at clause 60 reveals that the provision is not limited in that way, but allows individuals to be rendered stateless without reference to the possibility of securing citizenship elsewhere. The Home Secretary said:

“The whole point of the measure is to be able to remove certain people”.—[Official Report, 30 January 2014; Vol. 574, c. 1043.]

That assertion raises a number of important questions. I am interested to hear from the Minister how the Government will remove people who have no nationality and no travel documents.

Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD): The hon. Lady is making an important point. If another state were to remove citizenship from a naturalised citizen who was originally from the UK, does she envisage that it would be at all likely that our country would be enthusiastic about offering citizenship to that person? If we would not, why should we imagine that other countries would offer citizenship to someone who has had their citizenship revoked by this Government?

Ms Abbott: The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. The Government want to be able to move on people whom they consider a threat to the state, but why should other countries accept someone who has been stripped of citizenship here in the UK?

Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab): It is even worse, is it not? Potentially, the only countries that would offer nationality to a person reckoned to be a suspected terrorist would be countries where we probably would not want that person to end up, because they would by definition be countries that sponsor terrorism. We would end up with people in this country who we would simply be keeping completely stateless, without any role or standing. We cannot simply banish them to France as we would have done in the middle ages.

Ms Abbott: My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. In saying that, I am accepting an argument that I do not really support, namely that somehow, because someone is alleged to be a terrorist, that makes them a terrorist. Even if we accept that logic, we will not be making the country any safer, because we cannot move such people on anywhere.

Statelessness is a notion that the British Government were trying to move away from for a long time. In 1930, Britain was among the first to ratify the convention on certain questions relating to the conflict of nationality, which included a protocol relating to certain cases of statelessness. The universal declaration of human rights, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly with UK support as far back as 1948, says:

“Everyone has the right to a nationality…No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality”,
yet that is what clause 60 of the Immigration Bill seeks to do.
Deprivation of citizenship is a severe sanction and statelessness is a separate and even more brutal punishment with unique practical and legal consequences. Although it is an aspiration of human rights activists that fundamental rights such as the right to life and the prohibition on torture should attach to all human beings, the reality is that we live in a world deeply divided along national borders, in which it is notoriously difficult to access redress for, or protection on, human rights matters without nationality.

Going further forward, the UN convention on the reduction of statelessness, which is where we are supposed to be going, was adopted in 1961 and ratified by the UK in 1966. It stipulates that, absent circumstances of fraudulent application or disloyalty toward the contracting state, deprivations and renunciations of citizenship will take effect only where a person has or subsequently obtains another nationality in replacement. The clause moves away from that. This country has spent a generation trying to move away from statelessness, but we are now going in reverse.

We may not have seen the end of this matter; that is why the other place should look at the provision. We had the Home Secretary saying that citizenship was a privilege, not a right, but citizenship is a fact. During the same debate, Alok Sharma MP—

Jim Sheridan(in the Chair): Order. It would be preferable to mention hon. Members not by name, but by their constituency.

Ms Abbott: The hon. Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma) raised with the Home Secretary the question of whether we could extend the stripping away of citizenship from naturalised citizenship. He said:

 “I am a naturalised British citizen and the clause therefore applies to me. I support it wholeheartedly…Perhaps my right hon. Friend should go even further…and introduce similar sanctions against anyone who is British, irrespective of how they got British citizenship”.

The Home Secretary responded:

“My hon. Friend makes an important point about…the desire that we have in the House to ensure that we can take appropriate action against people who are acting in a manner that is not conducive to the public good”.—[Official Report, 30 January 2014; Vol. 574, c. 1042.]

One of the problems with the new clause is that it opens the door to further arbitrary deprivation of citizenship. It must be wrong in principle to create two classes of citizenship. It is wrong in practice because it will create a class of stateless people who, in practice, cannot be moved out of the UK. It seems that
the coalition Government introduced the clause as a short-term strategy to see off a related but separate clause covering the ability of foreign criminals to resist deportation on the grounds that they have a right to family life. I suggest that the civil liberties of British citizens are too important to be tampered with for short-term political advantage.

Coming as I do from a family in which many members of my parents’ generation obtained British citizenship through naturalisation, and representing as I do a part of London where many of my constituents obtained British citizenship through naturalisation, I am naturally wary of any move to create two classes of British citizenship, as that could affect so many of my constituents and even members of my family. The clause was thought up in a hurry, and as with so much legislation that is though up in a hurry, it is deeply flawed. I sincerely hope that when members of the other place consider it, they will take it out of the Bill.




back ⇢