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UK have right to withdraw citizenship

08:12 / 01.04.03

A law allowing the UK to strip dual citizens of their british citizenship if they "seriously prejudice the UK's interests", under new laws coming into force today.(details here)

I'm flabbergasted - especially that i didn't know about this before today. It strikes me as a serious blow to civil liberties - but does anyone have a good thing to say about this law?

11:58 / 01.04.03

Well, if the UK has the right to stop people from getting in the country based on their nationality, doesn't really surprise me that they can cut british citizenship.

12:44 / 01.04.03

That's incredibly disturbing. It's like saying that because your parents are from, say, Turkey, they indefinitely hold the right to send you there.

It could be worse, the new Patriot Act allows the US to strip US citizens of their citizenship, and if they have no other citizenship to rely on, the government will detain them indefinitely.

13:09 / 01.04.03

Newsflash: the United States government has always had the right to revoke citizenship under certain circumstances—if an individual enlists in the military of a foreign power, for instance. (And not even always then—plenty of US citizens joined the Canadian or French armed forces before the US entered WWI, for instance: the rule is usually invoked in times of war for citizens enlisting with a hostile government.)

Other nations have similar provisos, I'm sure. I don't think it's particularly unjust, and 'twere ever thus—from the origin of the concepts of "democracy"and "citizenship" in ancient Greece, there's always been a balance between individual freedom and collective responsibility.

Citizenship is about far more than heritage or residency: I don't know what the process is in the UK, but in the States there's a written or oral examination that a prospective citizen must pass.

Fun for US folks: here's the question pool for the citizenship exam. Could you answer all 100 questions?

15:48 / 06.04.03

What really gets me is the fact that this seems almost wholy about getting rid of Sheikh Abu Hamza. For a start, legislation against one man's porbablly gonna turn out a bit bollocks when you apply it to a population, but exactly how is the national interest helped by shipping him OUT of our little security net, and INTO Egypt, where there is a higher chance of him escaping the authorities and being all evil n' shit??

16:13 / 06.04.03

I had to laugh: After making a big deal about how they're sending him back to Egypt, they find out He Has No Dual Citizenship.

Attempts to strip the Muslim radical Abu Hamza of his British citizenship descended into farce last night, when it was revealed that he had no other nationality and was not the holder of an Egyptian passport, as originally thought

Another question: did anyone really take this guy seriously?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

17:13 / 06.04.03

There was a great line in one of the papers recently about how he lost his hand defusing a mine during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.

Surely that should have been "he lost a hand NOT defusing a mine..."

Back to the point- I find this very worrying. Although part of me's saying it's just a PR thing anyway... surely "incitement to racial hatred" (one of the things Hamza's - fairly rightly - accused of) is against the law anyway? Surely just prosecuting him under existing legislation is much less effort that attempting to deport him and changing the entire judicial system in the process?

17:20 / 06.04.03

Well you would think that they should have enough on him to convict him under an existing law. And if not then that's surely another illustration of how inadequate the security services' intelligence on Islamist fundamentalists was prior to Sept 11.

But the fact that our legislation is becoming increasingly similar to US law on this issue is rather worrying. I'm sure it's a guaranteed vote-winner though.