LONDON: A “racist two-tier system” is resulting in the UK stripping British Muslims of citizenship at record rates, a new report has found.
Published by the Runnymede Trust and Reprieve, the report found that the UK is the only G20 country to strip citizenship en masse, having done so more than 200 times since 2010.
This has taken place on the grounds of “public good,” and has mainly targeted those now detained in Syrian detention centers following the collapse of Daesh.
Compared to Britain, the French government only resorted to the citizenship-stripping measure 16 times between 2002 and 2020.
The report condemned the “secretive” system that allows Britons with dual nationality, or naturalized citizens, to be deprived of their citizenship.
Many have only been vaguely informed of the evidence relating to their individual decision, and the government is not required to inform them that their citizenship has been stripped.
The most high-profile case is that of Shamima Begum, who left London to live in Daesh-held territory as a teenager.
UN experts believe that she was trafficked to Syria, and since having her citizenship stripped, she has resided in a detention center in the country.
The report highlighted the “shocking” racial disparity of existing cases of citizenship stripping, which targeted people of color at a rate 12 times higher than their white British peers.
A Home Office spokesperson described the report as “scaremongering and wrong,” adding that the system is used to “protect the British public from some of the most dangerous people, including terrorists and serious organised criminals.”
The vast majority of former British citizens who were stripped of their citizenship are Muslim with Middle Eastern, South Asian or North African heritage.
The practice of stripping citizenship was previously taboo in the West, after the Nazi government in the Second World War conducted mass removals of the status of German Jews.
From 1973 to 2002 in the UK, no stripping of citizenship took place except in response to cases of fraud, the report found.
Imran, whose sister was stripped of her citizenship, told The Independent: “You’ve got secret courts ... where you’re not allowed to be present. And you’re not allowed to understand what’s being discussed.”
The Runnymede and Reprieve report urged the government to immediately end the practice. The laws that grant the home secretary the power to deprive citizenship should also be abolished, it said.
MP Andrew Mitchell of the opposition Conservative Party told The Independent: “I don’t think it’s for a ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ politician to be able, at the stroke of a pen, to remove someone’s citizenship, much less stick it in a drawer in the Home Office without informing them.”
Labour peer Alf Dubs, who fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia as a child, described the system as “absolutely outrageous” and urged the government to change course.
