Dr Devyani Prabhat, Lecturer in Law, School of Law
Earlier I posted on this blog how British citizenship is being increasingly shaped by foreign nationality laws. Foreign nationality laws become relevant in cases where a person is a dual citizen and is about to lose British citizenship. The common scenario is of national security cases where the government may decide to strip terrorism suspects of their British citizenship. Until recently, the government had to ensure the person affected had a remaining citizenship. This was to prevent creating statelessness. Affected people could challenge the loss of their British citizenship on the ground that they did not have any other citizenship to call their own. The court would then have to examine foreign nationality laws to determine if this was correct. In my last post I criticised how this exercise often becomes a technical assessment of foreign laws. Substantive rights arguments usually did not come up in these cases despite there being clear implications for right to family life (Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, ECHR) and right to fair trial (Article 6, ECHR). At that time I did not anticipate the rapid change of law that has made even the technical considerations of statelessness mostly redundant.