In February of this year, Sajid Javid stripped 19-year-old Shamima Begum of her British citizenship, just days after she was located by The Times’ war correspondent, Anthony Loyd, in a refugee camp in Northern Syria. Begum was 15 when she left East London together with two friends to travel to ISIS territory. Already nine months pregnant when she was found by Loyd, she gave birth to a boy three days later. Within days of the decision being made to deprive her of her British citizenship, it was announced that her newborn son had died of pneumonia, the third of her children to meet this fate in two years. In a letter to the home secretary published in The Times, Begum’s family lawyer described Javid’s decision as “human fly-tipping” and a “politically-driven abuse of power” motivated by Javid’s personal ambitions to become Prime Minister.
Begum’s case prompted immediate national debate, but it also raises significant wider questions about the principles governing UK citizenship, the government’s ‘counter-extremism’ policy, and the social meaning of ‘Britishness’. This article is concerned primarily with those issues rather than the specific circumstances of Begum’s case. Often overlooked in the original debate was the larger point that the deprivation powers create a two-tiered system of citizenship where the protection of civil rights can be determined, in effect, by racial and ethnic identity. Such issues of race and civil liberties must figure centrally in any honest assessment of Theresa May’s legacy, as well as the prospect of a new Conservative leadership.
Since 2014, the Home Secretary has had two broad powers of citizenship deprivation. The first can be called the ‘Naturalisation Power’. This allows the Home Secretary to strip naturalised British citizens of their citizenship if he is satisfied that deprivation is “conducive to the public good” and there are “reasonable grounds” for believing that the person is able to acquire a different nationality, whether or not they would be made immediately stateless by the order.
