Revocation of Citizenship: The New Policies of Conditional Membership

Emilien Fargues,Iseult Honohan

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3821607

Abstract

In many countries across the world, citizenship revocation policies are back on the political agenda. States are either contemplating or adopting legislative changes to increase the power of the executive to take citizenship away from individuals on an array of legal grounds, from fraud in the naturalisation process to involvement in terror-related acts. Amendments to citizenship legislation are also decided with the purpose of excluding entire communities from the definition of national identity and removing them out of the state borders. This symposium addresses the challenges that the revival of citizenship revocation raises for the study of citizenship as a secure and equal membership in a state. It brings together academics and practitioners in an effort to reflect both on the concrete policy implications of citizenship stripping and on its theoretical significance. The symposium also takes an original comparative perspective on this topic, with contributions that go beyond Western contexts represented in much of the citizenship literature.

Highlights

Syria’s Kurds comprise its largest non-Arab ethnic group
The official framing and justifications of the Assam National Register of Citizens (NRC) and Citizenship Amendment Act’ (CAA)-National Register of Indian Citizens’ (NRIC) tend to obscure the mechanisms and implications of these policies. This essay disputes these characterisations. It adopts a different set of vocabularies that we propose capture the full essence of the National Register of Citizens (the NRC), the NRIC and the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (the CAA) within the Indian citizenship regime
We argue that the procedural arbitrariness and legally unspecified safeguards in Assam’s NRC threaten citizenship revocation

Summary

Conclusion

These case studies demonstrate practices of revocation of citizenship in a new range of contexts. To the extent that they apply criteria for citizenship retroactively, discriminate among citizens on ethnic or religious lines, and offer a limited framework for appeal, they display elements of arbitrary withdrawal Such practices undermine the security central to the status of citizenship, whose loss is critical even when not associated with deportation, but with the loss of rights and exclusions from social, economic and cultural life. We can identify one pattern where citizenship attribution on the basis of birth in the state is superseded by descent from a citizen, and this is further narrowed to restricted national groups; citizenship is retrospectively revoked from those who are represented as failing to meet these redefined criteria for citizenship These cases remind us forcefully that citizenship status is the tip of an iceberg, depending on secure documentation, of place of birth, of ancestry, of status, from birth registration onwards. Citizenship revocation and statelessness of Kurds in Syria: Repression of Kurdish rights by Ba’athist Assad regime in Syria (1962-2011)

Introduction

Discussion

Findings

A Decade of Denationalisation

Joint Statement