Chris Bryant
Main Page: Chris Bryant (Labour - Rhondda and Ogmore)Department Debates - View all Chris Bryant's debates with the Home Office
(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
It is even worse, is it not? Potentially, the only countries that would offer nationality to a person reckoned to be a suspected terrorist would be countries where we probably would not want that person to end up, because they would by definition be countries that sponsor terrorism. We would end up with people in this country who we would simply be keeping completely stateless, without any role or standing. We cannot simply banish them to France as we would have done in the middle ages.
Ms Abbott
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. In saying that, I am accepting an argument that I do not really support, namely that somehow, because someone is alleged to be a terrorist, that makes them a terrorist. Even if we accept that logic, we will not be making the country any safer, because we cannot move such people on anywhere.
Statelessness is a notion that the British Government were trying to move away from for a long time. In 1930, Britain was among the first to ratify the convention on certain questions relating to the conflict of nationality, which included a protocol relating to certain cases of statelessness. The universal declaration of human rights, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly with UK support as far back as 1948, says:
“Everyone has the right to a nationality…No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality”,
yet that is what clause 60 of the Immigration Bill seeks to do.
Deprivation of citizenship is a severe sanction and statelessness is a separate and even more brutal punishment with unique practical and legal consequences. Although it is an aspiration of human rights activists that fundamental rights such as the right to life and the prohibition on torture should attach to all human beings, the reality is that we live in a world deeply divided along national borders, in which it is notoriously difficult to access redress for, or protection on, human rights matters without nationality.
Going further forward, the UN convention on the reduction of statelessness, which is where we are supposed to be going, was adopted in 1961 and ratified by the UK in 1966. It stipulates that, absent circumstances of fraudulent application or disloyalty toward the contracting state, deprivations and renunciations of citizenship will take effect only where a person has or subsequently obtains another nationality in replacement. The clause moves away from that. This country has spent a generation trying to move away from statelessness, but we are now going in reverse.
We may not have seen the end of this matter; that is why the other place should look at the provision. We had the Home Secretary saying that citizenship was a privilege, not a right, but citizenship is a fact. During the same debate, Alok Sharma MP—