The UK Supreme Court recently heard the Home Office’s appeal of the decision to allow Shamima Begum the right to return to the UK to challenge the revocation of her citizenship. Shamima, the UK-born British citizen who travelled to Syria to join ISIS at the age of 15, was planning on returning to the UK early last year before Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary at the time, took the controversial decision to revoke her British citizenship. In doing so without fully exploring whether Shamima is entitled to a Bangladeshi citizenship, the government has shown a seemingly reckless disregard for international law.
Perhaps more sinisterly, Shamima’s case highlights the fact that UK-born dual citizens, who are predominantly children of immigrants, only have a conditional citizenship that can be easily revoked based on an arbitrary decision of the Home Secretary driven by racialised moral panic. Meanwhile, British citizens who do not have dual citizenship (predominantly white people with UK-born parents) cannot be stripped of their citizenship and are therefore immune from this additional layer of punishment. This directly assaults the rule of law, disregarding the fundamental principle that all citizens should have equality before the law.
VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW
As governed by the British Nationality Act in accordance with the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, the Home Secretary can revoke the citizenship of a non-naturalised person if they deem the revocation to be “conducive to the public good” and they are satisfied it would not make the person stateless.
It was alleged that Shamima has Bangladeshi citizenship, which could make her citizenship deprivation legal. However, it has since been confirmed by the Bangladeshi government and publicly available information that Shamima only held British citizenship, leading many to conclude that the decision to revoke her citizenship is a violation of both domestic and international law. However, even if Shamima’s deprivation was legal, the government’s treatment of her case is symptomatic of the dangerous and discriminatory policies surrounding British citizenship.
THE UK’S DISCRIMINATORY CITIZENSHIP LAWS
The Home Secretary argued that revoking Shamima’s citizenship and not allowing her back into the country was necessary because she poses a “national security risk”. However, this is not a novel situation so should not be treated as such. In fact, approximately 40% of the 900 British citizens that travelled to fight for ISIS have returned to the UK. It is for the authorities to then assess whether the individual poses a risk to the public, and it is the function of the criminal justice system to take measures to protect the public and punish the offender if appropriate. There is no question that if Shamima was allowed back into the UK, she should be evaluated in this way and put through the criminal justice system if that is necessary to ensure the safety of the public. Revoking her citizenship, however, does not make the public safer. It is an irresponsible and dangerous policy decision that merely shifts the problem, which the UK’s criminal justice system should be equipped to deal with, elsewhere.
The policy of citizenship deprivation also creates a two-tier approach to British citizenship. Those who are entitled to dual citizenship (usually because their parents are immigrants) effectively have a conditional citizenship that can be removed at the Home Secretary’s will, while those who only have British lineage have an unconditional British citizenship that cannot be rescinded. Essentially, under UK law, if your parents are immigrants your citizenship is not likely to bear the same legal weight, due to its ease of revocation, as someone whose parents are not immigrants. Thus, quite literally giving immigrants and their children a second-class citizenship.
Further, the majority of the 40% of former ISIS fighters returning to the UK were assessed to pose no risk or low risk to the public. Why then was a schoolgirl groomed at the age of 15 who travelled to Syria to marry a member of ISIS deemed to be a national security threat while the other British citizens who returned from fighting for ISIS were not? Undoubtedly, this decision was driven by reactionary public outrage and moral panic.
As we have seen from the knife crime “crisis” to the “migrant invasion,” moral panics tend to be racialised, with those at the sharp end of the reactionary policies being ethnic minorities. This is especially pertinent in the case of citizenship deprivations as many Black and Brown people, whose parents are from former UK colonies in the Global South, hold dual citizenship. Thus, the act of the state’s stripping people’s British citizenship is markedly racialised and specifically targets Black and Brown people.
Although recent specific figures and information related to citizenship deprivations have not been released, we can see from previous data that Muslims are disproportionately impacted by citizenship deprivations. This has the obvious implication that, in the eyes of the state, British Muslims are deemed less British than non-Muslims. This is a familiar pattern that has been seen in the Windrush Scandal, where Black and Brown people’s “Britishness” is repeatedly placed in a more precarious position than that of white people.
For comparison, studies have shown that far-right terrorism is a greater security threat to the West than Islamic terrorism, and it is clearly in equal violation of “British values”. However, there are no recorded attempts of far-right terrorists being stripped of their citizenship in the name of public security. Why is it that the criminal justice system can sufficiently ensure the safety of the public in the case of predominantly white terrorists but not for predominantly non-white terrorists? The answer is surely down to the fundamental issue that a white Briton’s citizenship is seen as unconditional, while a non-white person’s citizenship exists as a “privilege, not a right”.
For a more direct comparison, in the case of the white, middle-class, Muslim terrorist “Jihadi Jack” Letts, it took the UK government about two years from his appeal to come home to revoke his citizenship, despite his admission that he “wanted to [commit a suicide bomb attack] in a car”. Conversely, Shamima’s citizenship was stripped within just six days of her request even though she does not seem to have personally committed any violence. Additionally, the Home Office repeatedly declined to comment on Jack’s case, stating that “[t]he Home Office does not comment on individual cases,” while they have repeatedly publicly commented on Shamima’s case. This comparison alone presents a stark difference in the treatment received by a white man and a South Asian woman, even though the white man seemed to have posed a greater public safety threat.
Shamima’s case is part of the dangerous trend emerging of British citizens increasingly being stripped of their citizenship. Between 2016 and 2017, citizenship deprivations increased by 600%. Even more worrying, the government has proposed expanding their citizenship stripping powers to not just cover terror offences but also other serious criminals such as “child grooming gangmasters”. Although initially this might not provoke sympathy, it is not hard to see the government further expand these powers to lesser crimes in the future, incorporating citizenship deprivation into the UK’s system of criminal punishments. This would create a two-tier justice system where immigrants and their children receive harsher punishments for the same crimes, further increasing the disproportionate criminalisation of ethnic minorities in the UK.
The dangers of the government’s decision to revoke Shamima’s citizenship go far beyond the question of whether this leaves her stateless under international law. The government’s decision is a direct assault on the rule of law and highlights the malevolent course towards a discriminatory two-tier justice system.
Isaac is a final year LLB student at the University of Leeds. His interests lie broadly in human rights law, including in tenants rights law, immigration law, civil rights law, prisoner rights law and environmental law. In the future, he aims to become a movement lawyer using the law as a tool for social change.