Description
How can an individual’s human rights be protected in the context of states’ efforts to keep the nation safe? This question has gained renewed relevance with the proliferation of returning foreign terrorist fighters and the option of citizenship deprivation to counter the threat they are said to pose to national security. What used to be an ‘exceptional’ measure has become increasingly embedded in the UK over recent years, giving the executive broad discretion to deprive anyone of their citizenship if this was ‘conducive to the public good’.
The paper analyses the case of Shamima Begum, a British citizen who left the UK to marry an ISIL fighter in Syria and her attempts to return to the UK as an illustration of how the measure is being applied in a discriminatory way. Citizenship has shifted from being a right to being a privilege, contingent on the Home Secretary’s assessment of whether an individual adheres to ‘British values’. The paper argues that citizenship has become a securitised and racialized concept that is conditional on ill-defined criteria of what it means to be a ‘good’ British citizen.
