Immigration Bill

Frank Dobson Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about his position and also about the desire that we have in the House to ensure that we can take appropriate action against people who are acting in a manner that is not conducive to the public good and who are acting in a manner that is seriously prejudicial to this country’s interests.

New clause 18 recreates—

[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

When I first became a Member of this House, anyone born in Britain automatically became a British citizen. That right was taken away by the Thatcher Government. Will this law apply to the children of people who have acquired British citizenship?

[Mrs May]

It applies to somebody who is a naturalised person. That is who it applies to. It seeks to recreate the very specific sub-set of cases that are currently provided for under the “conducive” power. It would allow me to deprive a person of their citizenship, regardless of whether it left them stateless, but as I say, it applies only to those who are naturalised, not those who are British by birth or those who register to acquire citizenship under other provisions of the 1981 Act—

[Frank Dobson]

rose—

[Mrs May]

If the right hon. Gentleman would wait—such as those which provide for children to acquire British citizenship. And it would apply only to very serious cases of people whose conduct is

“seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the United Kingdom”.

Those safeguards and limitations are important. The amendment will allow the key consideration to be whether the person’s actions are consistent with the values we all attach to British citizenship. We may all have a slightly different interpretation of what they might be, but I am confident that Members of this House would agree that this is encapsulated by the oath that naturalised citizens take when they attend their citizenship ceremonies.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. In some cases we are able to return people, and we do a lot of work with other countries, through our agreements on deportation with assurances, to ensure that we can deport people elsewhere. Of course, there was a particular case in which we could not take such action against an individual because it would have rendered them stateless, notwithstanding the fact that they were in a position to apply for citizenship of another state.

[Frank Dobson]

It may be a fault in me that I did not understand the Home Secretary’s reply to my question earlier. Will she confirm that the child of someone who had acquired British citizenship would be subject to the law that she envisages?

[Mrs May]

I thought that I had provided some clarity in the answer that I gave the right hon. Gentleman earlier. The law will be limited to naturalised citizens and will not apply to anybody who has British citizenship by any other means. The action would be taken against the naturalised British citizen, not their child.

[Mrs May]

I recognise that there are consequences, and they have been considered. The circumstances that the right hon. Gentleman mentions are if the child was in the United Kingdom and their parent was elsewhere conducting activity that was seriously prejudicial to the United Kingdom. That would be considered on a case by case basis—there would not be a tick-box, mechanistic approach. All circumstances would be looked at in considering whether it was appropriate to apply the new power to an individual. There are safeguards within the proposal, such as the seriously prejudicial nature of the activity that an individual must have undertaken.

I had not quite finished my response to the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) when I allowed the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) to intervene. I repeat the response that I gave earlier to the former: the law will apply only to those who are naturalised, not those who are British by birth or those who acquired citizenship under other provisions of the 1981 Act, such as those that provide for children to acquire British citizenship. I hope that I have perhaps made that clearer to the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras.

[Frank Dobson]

If that is the case, what powers did the Home Secretary use to take citizenship away from my constituent Mahdi Hashi, who was then kidnapped by the Americans in Somalia and is now in court in New York?

[Mrs May]

I will not discuss an individual case, but if the right hon. Gentleman wishes to write to me about it, I will respond to him. I have set out the powers that I already have to deprive citizenship, which are twofold. The first circumstance is when somebody has acquired citizenship through deception or fraud, and the second is when somebody has acted in a manner that is seriously prejudicial to our national interest and they would not be rendered stateless as a result of the deprivation of their British citizenship.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Brazier]

That was indeed our tradition. It has of course been suspended many times, including for six years during the second world war when German citizens were locked up. There was a divided ruling in the House of Lords, as my hon. Friend will be well aware, on one such German citizen who brought a habeas corpus case.

My point is this: only by putting a measure through can we see whether or not it is possible to sort out this kind of scandalous situation while still allowing Strasbourg to be the supreme court. Can we test it? That is the only way. Personally I think we should do what Lord Judge recommends; we should pass an Act making it clear that the European Court of Human rights should not be our supreme court and that it is only there for persuasive purposes and that, ultimately, the Supreme Court in Britain is our supreme court and that Parliament is sovereign.

I want to touch for a couple of minutes on a subject that has not been discussed at all and is extremely relevant to my hon. Friend’s amendment, which is judicial activism. The legislation that followed the Human Rights Act gave huge powers of discretion to judges; in fact one of the most interesting comments coming out of the Court of Appeal ruling on 8 October 2013 was its comment in passing that the reference to exceptional circumstances in the rules—to which I objected when it went through—was consistent with the proportionality balancing exercise required by Strasbourg jurisprudence. In other words, basically it did not affect judicial discretion at all.

The fact is that individual judges—who have accepted so little guidance from Parliament or resolutions of the House of Commons in this matter—have, basically off their own backs, acted in extreme cases involving people guilty of the most revolting crimes and allowed an article 8 ruling to overrule that. That has happened even when the family connection here was pretty tenuous; in one case, the family connection was desperate to disassociate itself from the individual. That is a measure of the extent to which we are suffering from judicial activism among at least one portion of the judiciary. I want to see the constitutional side of this fixed and I want my hon. Friend’s amendment to be passed. I shall vote for it. I also believe that we will need to pass a measure to make it clear that the supreme court in this country is the British Supreme Court. But I suspect that we will still have a residual problem with the issue of judicial activism.

Let me end my speech by reminding the House of perhaps the most famous case of judicial activism within a common-law jurisdiction in modern history, the Dred Scott case of 1865. I remind those who talk about the rule of law that had President Lincoln not stood up to the Supreme Court in America—had he not said “I was elected as President on this mandate: to prevent the spread of slavery into new states”, and brushed away the court’s finding—there would have been no civil war between 1861 and 1865, and there would have been no end to slavery in America at that stage. I think that most people believe that what happened was right.

[Frank Dobson]

I shall try to be very brief.

The Home Secretary’s proposal to extend her powers in respect of the removal of British citizenship from a limited and specific group of people must be assessed against the judgment that it is in the national interest or for the public good. I have to say that I have never heard anyone give a single example of Britain’s having benefited from some individual’s loss of British citizenship, and I think that it behoves the Home Office, and possibly the Foreign Office, to find out whether there actually have been any such benefits, because there are certainly disbenefits. Harm is done, or can be done, when someone loses British citizenship, and I do not mean that harm is done to the person who loses his citizenship. I mean that harm is done to other people—to the rest of us.

In my constituency, a young Somali—I do not know whether he is a terrorist or not a terrorist—went to Somalia, got married and had children. He was going to come back to this country, for what purpose I know not, but when he went to Djibouti he was arrested. After his arrest, when he was being handed over to some Americans, he said “You cannot do that: I am a British citizen.” He was then told “You are not any more, because the Home Secretary has taken your citizenship away.” He ended up being kidnapped by the Americans, and is now facing a court in New York. If he has done something that merits his going before a court in New York and he has never previously been to America, he could presumably have been prosecuted here for the same offence.

[Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)]

Under the current proposals, the person whose passport was removed would not necessarily appear in a court anywhere. The proposed measure gives the Secretary of State a very broad power when she considers it conducive to the public good to deprive someone of a passport because his or her conduct is

“seriously prejudicial to the vital interests”

of the United Kingdom. No actual crime is specified anywhere. Everyone has been talking about terrorists or other criminals, but the problem is that the proposed power is so broad.

[Frank Dobson]

I entirely agree. That is why I am doubtful about the capacity to take away people’s British citizenship.

There is a substantial Somali community in my constituency. Needless to say, it includes quite a few testosterone-exuding young men who are very upset about what is happening in Somalia, and who are dubious about what the British Government are or are not doing. However, a much bigger group of young men, and young women, have been working tremendously hard in trying to combat the extremist elements, such as people preaching hatred. Indeed, they have been very successful in doing so, and the Prime Minister himself has commended their effort and commitment. For instance, they have massively improved the performance of Somali young people in schools. One of the things that they were able to say when countering the arguments of the extremists who were trying to lead local young people astray was, “Always remember that you are a British citizen now: you are British, not Somali.”