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Abstract
Over the past 20 years, rules governing citizenship stripping have been debated and modified several times in France and Britain. Through this process, deprivation of citizenship has been transformed into a sanction that specifically targets ‘Islamist’ terrorists. This article examines the revival of citizenship deprivation from the mid-1990s onwards and draws on parliamentary debates, legal cases and interviews with lawyers and officials. It shows that governments develop strategies to make sure they are able to rid themselves of individuals whom they present as dangerous to the nation, even if this implies going back on or bypassing human rights norms. The theoretical argument put forward is that deprivation forms part of an effort to ‘renationalise’ citizenship, that is, to reassert national membership as a privilege that states can take back and to prove that this membership still matters both to provide individuals with rights and to protect the national community’s identity.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my two supervisors, Dr. Janie Pélabay and Dr. Réjane Sénac, Prof. Matthew Gibney, Prof. Christian Joppke and Dr. Sandra Mantu for their precious comments at different steps of the writing, as well as the two anonymous reviewers of the journal for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article. I am also indebted to David Copello, Dr. Lea Müller-Funk and Dr. Djordje Sredanovic for their careful reading and I wish to express my gratitude to Capucine Truong who helped me to go through the institutional sources and to refine the argument.
Notes
1. In the UK, the legal category defined as deprivation also covers loss of nationality on grounds of fraud – sections 40 (3) and (6) of the British Nationality Act (BNA), while these grounds form part of another procedure of involuntary loss in France that is called withdrawal (retrait) and is distinguished from deprivation – article 25 of the Civil Code. In this paper, I specifically focus on articles 40 (2) and 40 (4) A of the BNA, which correspond to article 25 of the Civil Code, that is, deprivation on national security grounds.
2. All translations from French are the author’s own, unless otherwise stated.
3. For a critical approach of the notion of ‘national models’ in citizenship or integration policies, see Bertossi and Duyvendak (Citation2012) and Vink and Bauböck (Citation2013).
4. On the necessity to compare public discourses to practices in the field of migration and nationality policies, see Lochak (Citation2007).
5. This was the core thesis of Hansen and Weil (Citation2001) in one of the first comparative historical studies of European citizenship policies. For a more recent discussion of the liberalisation thesis in comparative perspective, see Howard (Citation2009).
6. For a discussion of the restrictive character of citizenship and language tests in Europe, see notably Van Œrs, Ersbøll, and Kostakopoulou (Citation2010).
7. On the thickening of national membership that these policies produce, see Kostakopoulou (Citation2006) and Orgad (Citation2015).
8. In 2004, the procedural safeguards were diminished: from this year on, an appeal does not leave the deprivation order pending, so that the person targeted loses British citizenship almost instantly.
9. Since 1998, offences and crimes under general law that result in a sentence of five years or more can no longer be grounds for a deprivation order in France. Only three grounds remain, in addition to the offences and crimes regarding acts of terrorism: (1) civil servants who have been sentenced for an offence or a crime against the public administration; (2) failure to fulfil one’s obligations concerning civic service; (3) espionage for a foreign state.
10. See respectively Sidhoum-Rahal (Citation2016) and Slama (Citation2016).
11. Interview with a judge from the Internal Affaires Division of the Council of State, 30/05/2016.
12. The word ‘removal’ is not restricted here to the legal process through which states take irregular migrants away. I use it to refer to state actions that either remove individuals or keep them away from the national territory.
13. Interview with a former member of the French Ministry of Social Affairs in the early 2000s, 22/03/2016.
14. On the idea that the singularity of deprivation policies lies in their connection to the ‘deportation regime’, see Mills (Citation2016, 22).
15. Twenty-seven people were deprived of British citizenship on national security grounds between 2006 and 2015 (House of Commons Citation2015).
16. David Hicks is an Australian citizen who was being held in Guantanamo since 2002 and who applied for registration as a British citizen in 2005 in order to be extradited to the UK. The Home Secretary attempted to deprive him of his citizenship right after his registration but the Court of Appeal found that the government could not rely on facts that preceded his becoming a British citizen as grounds for the decision (Secretary of State for the Home Department (SSHD) v. David Hicks [2006] English and Welsh Court of Appeal). This, however, was later made possible with the IANA.
17. Mr. Al-Jedda obtained his British nationality by naturalisation in 2000, as an Iraqi refugee. As a consequence, he lost his Iraqi nationality and the judicial battle that followed the deprivation order taken against him in 2007 questioned the British government’s responsibility for his statelessness. The Supreme Court considered it as established (SSHD v. Al-Jedda [2013], United Kingdom Supreme Court), whereupon provisions on deprivation were added to the Immigration Bill to allow for statelessness under certain circumstances (see Anderson Citation2016, 8–9).
18. See ECtHR, Daoudi c/ France, 03/12/2009, request n°19,576/08.
19. I interviewed Mr. Sahnouni’s lawyer on 07/12/2015.
20. Mr. Sahnouni’s lawyer was informed of the deportation order on the evening before his client’s effective removal.
21. Décision n° 2014-439 QPC, 23/01/2015. The judges ruled that ‘different rules apply to different situations’.
22. So far, no case has been reported where a British citizen would have been left stateless after a deprivation order.
23. Interview with a UKVI officer, 22/02/2017.
24. Interview with a former cabinet member of the French Ministry of Social Affairs in the early 2000s, 22/03/2016.
25. Though I emphasise public uses of deprivation here, I am aware that governments may have an interest in keeping deprivation practices secret to act more freely. In the case of the UK more specifically, their sudden rise after 2010 would have most probably remained unknown if journalists from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and MPs had not pushed the government to release additional information.
26. See both Tony Blair (Wintour Citation2005) and François Hollande (Élysée Citation2015) when announcing legislative changes.
27. See the five decisions of the French Conseil d’État last year (available at: http://www.conseil-etat.fr/Actualites/Communiques/Decheance-de-nationalite3) and two recent decisions in UK courts: S1 etc. v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2016] EWCA Civ 560, and W2 And IA, R (On the Application Of) v The Secretary of State for the Home Department [2017] EWHC 928 (Admin).
28. According to British nationality law expert Harvey (Citation2016), the near-impossibility of appeal to out-of-country deprivation orders raises the question of arbitrariness.
29. For a further discussion on the issue of human rights infringements in relation to deprivation policies, see Zedner (Citation2016).