Can a passport be revoked?

[CrazyFoo]

Hi!

Can the governement of (Canada / USA) revoke a passport from one of it’s citizens?
If so, for what reason, and for how long?

Any historical examples?

Thanks

[friedo]

You usually have to surrender your passport if you’re charged with a serious crime, but I don’t know if that counts as revokation.

[KenGr]

I quickly searched and found a few things:

“Federal regulations empower the State Department to revoke the passport of a national who is the subject of a Federal warrant of arrest for a felony.”

http://www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/cse/pubs/reports/litigation/ch10.html

It turns out there are all kinds of court cases over the right to revoke passports for all kinds of Federal actions against individuals. The key case seems to Haig vs. Agee (1981). (Alexander Haig and Philip Agee - formerly CIA).

"In a 7-to-2 decision, the Court held that Passport Act of 1926 and other congressional statutes implicitly granted the Secretary of State the power to revoke passports. The Court noted Congress’s historical recognition of “Executive authority to withhold passports on the basis of substantial reasons of national security and foreign policy.” The Court further held that because the regulations were limited to cases in which there was a likelihood of “serious damage” to foreign policy, Agee’s claims concerning the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, and the right to travel were “without merit.”

[KP]

Linus Pauling, who won Nobel Peace Prizes for Chemistry and Peace, was just one famous example of a prominent American whose passport was revoked for espousing political views that were not favored by the Administration (e.g. World Peace and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty). This made all the major papers in the 1950s (I wasn’t born yet, but read about it in Crick and Watson’s “The Double Helix”

[url=]Just one article of many
Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace on October 10, 1963, the day the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty went into effect. The chairman of the Nobel Committee declared that without a petition like Pauling’s, there surely would not have been such swift action for a ban on nuclear weapons testing – and perhaps there would have been no treaty at all. Without the treaty, Pauling says, people all over the world would have suffered millions of birth defects and a significantly higher incidence of cancer.

…

Indeed, well before he was awarded a second Nobel Prize, Pauling’s activism effectively cost him his job at Cal Tech. His funding from the National Institutes of Health was cut, along with that of forty other scientists. And when he tried to go to the United Kingdom to deliver a lecture on protons, the U.S. government denied his passport. Pauling recalls one of the explanations he received: “‘Your anti-communist statements haven’t been strong enough.’”

For two years the State Department would not issue him a passport… In 1954, when he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, The New York Times brought the controversy to light, and he was finally allowed to travel again. America’s lingering apprehension about Pauling’s political alliances was made clear by Life magazine, which called his Peace Prize a “Weird Insult from Norway.”

[CrazyFoo]

Nice finds fellas,

thank you.

[Rube_E.Tewesday]

And here is section 10 of applicable Canadian Regulation, The Canadian Passport Order:

10. The Passport Office may revoke the passport of a person on any ground on which it may refuse to issue a passport to that person if he were an applicant and may revoke the passport of a person who

(a) being outside Canada, stands charged in a foreign country or state with the commission of any offence that would constitute an indictable offence if committed in Canada;

(b) uses the passport to assist him in committing an indictable offence in Canada or any offence in a foreign country or state that would constitute an indictable offence if committed in Canada;

© permits another person to use the passport;

(d) has obtained the passport by means of false or misleading information; or

(e) has ceased to be a Canadian citizen.

[CrazyFoo]

Those answers seam reasonable.
At least they can’t revoke it if you owe a huge tax bill, and they are worried about someone getting happy feet.

Thailand here I come! LOL

[KP]

Actually, they can. You can only contest it afterwards. Pauling was not shy about suing. He sued at least two Secretaries of Defense and several newspapers. Unfortunately, he learned he had no grounds to sue the Department of State. (He would have liked to establish a precedent, because other scientists had had their passports revoked on flimsy bases during the anti-communist hysteria)