UK PM wishes to refuse exit/entry to citizens

Great Debates
1

UK Prime Minister Cameron is going to press for a law enabling the police to seize the passport of citizens that are believed to be going to fight with ISIS.
CNN:

He is also going to introduce legislation to bar UK citizens who have been fighting with ISIS.

Can he do this? I know that the UK has no written constitution, but instead operates under an accretion over centuries of law, common law, and precedence. Even with a law to empower this, is that any other operative principle that would over-ride such a law?

I’m wondering more about the right to return, but I don’t know if there are nuances in the right to exit in the UK that I’m unaware of.

(This is possibly a General Question.)

2

As for the right of return, the immediately former Attorney-General Dominic Grieve thinks that banning people from return is clearly against the common and international law:

No doubt the government could concoct something to put to the legislature, but something fundamental like that would struggle to get through the Commons, never mind the Lords.

The seizure of passports on exit seems much less of a problem - they are Crown property after all.

3

In a recent thread on Scots, I linked to the Universal Declaration of Human Richts, and in particular — coincidentally — to Airticle 13:
Awbody hes the richt tae traivel freely and bide inwith the mairches o ony state, and the richt tae win oot frae and back intil their countrie
That’s pretty clear.
David Cameron, as ever, can go spit up a rope.

4

Sorry, meant to add - there’s already recent precedent for preventing people from leaving the country. Known football hooligans have been ordered to surrender their passports when big international competitions are on, for example.

5

So, in court, do barristers who quote these laws have to pronounce them as when they were originally written? That would be awesome.

6

Well, can’t they just let them in and arrest them for terrorism?

7

I’m fairly sure the UDHR wasn’t originally written in Scots.

8

That wouldn’t generate the “Tough on Terror!” headlines. The current UK government is headed by a not-very-talented PR man, and it often shows.

9

Well, that’s what I was wondering. If a country believes that a citizen was performing acts illegal under its law, why would you not greet them at the border with, “Welcome home! You have the right to remain silent . . .”

And, yes, the right to exit is certainly under far more established restrictions. Some accused criminals on bail must surrender their passports, etc. I guess it’s the infringement of the right to return that is far more bewildering to me.

10

Actually, in the UK context, the idea of excluding citizens is not a novel one.

Up to 1948, there were just British Subjects, and all British Subjects had the right of entry and abode in the UK.

Then, in 1948, it was decided that independent member states of the Commonwealth would have their own citizenship, with the unifying status of “British Subject” for all those who held any Commonwealth citizenship. So you had Canadian citizenship, Australian citizenship, etc. And one of the citizenships created under this regime was “Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies”, which included not only people from the UK, but people from all parts of the Commonwealth which were not yet independent, and did not have their own citizenships. As more countries became independent, CUKCs from those countries (mostly) lost CUKC status, and acquired the citizenship of the newly-independent country. As before, all CUKCs had a right of entry and abode in the UK.

Some time around the early 1970s, though, this changed. Concerned about immigration by, you know, people with black hair and brown eyes, the British introduced rules under which the right of entry and abode in the UK depended on “patriality”; being born in the UK, or having a parent born there. The upshot was that a large number of CUKCs no longer had the right of entry and abode in the UK. (At the same time, some Commonwealth citizens who were not CUKCs retained this right, because they were patrials.)

Matters continued until 1981, when legislative reform subdivided the CUKC category into a number of distinct citizenships; British Citizen, British Overseas Territory Citizen, British Overseas Citizen, British National Overseas, British Subject, British Protected Person. These were all UK citizenships in that they were all conferred by the UK government, they all engaged the diplomatic protection of the UK government, and they were all recognised by other countries as UK citizenships. But only one of them carried a right of entry and abode in the UK.

There have been further legislative tweakings since, and some of these categories of citizenship are closed to new entrants, and so will eventually disappear. But the fact remains that there are categories of citizenship conferred by the UK government which do not give any right to enter or live in the UK. So, as far as UK law and practice is concerned, there is nothing inherent in the notion of citizenship which involves a right of entry or a right of abode.

Denying a right of entry to a citizen on the basis of what he is thought to have done is novel. But denying a right of entry to a citizen is already a long-established practice.

In post #3 Claverhouse points to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the clear tension between what it says and what the British government does. But the UDHR does not have the force of law in Britain, and the tension has existed for a long time. The British government have obviously decided that they can live with it.

(The UK is also one of the few western countries to have practiced internal exile, like the Soviets used to do. But that’s another story.)

11

In 1948 the population of the then British Empire would have been how many?

A billion?

If it is true they all had the right of entry and abode in the UK, it does not seem unreasonable that the law was changed as countries became independent and created their won citizens. The point is that people were not rendered stateless. They were citizens of another country.

What Cameron is trying to do is a departure from that and revoke British citizenship obtained by birth in the UK. Creating people who are stateless. If he attempts to pass a law to that effect, it will be challenged during the law making process, in the Commons and the Lords. It may also breach international treaties the UK has signed up to and face many challenges in the courts.

Then there is also the question of what these people have done to deserve this treatment and what evidence there that they are intent on committing treason and acts of sedition.

A lot of people go to war torn areas to help others, for humanitarian reasons. Should they be rendered stateless because these conflicts also attract wannabe Rambos who may or may not be emboldened to commit terrorist acts when they return to the UK?

How much do we know about the activities of UK nationals in these war torn countries? How much evidence? A few video tapes with possibly British accents does not amount to much evidence. Cameron has to be seen to be doing something to protect the UK lest we have another spate of terror bombings as we did in 2005. However, about the only thing politicians can do in public is to make pronoucements about passing tough new laws.

The UK governments previous efforts to create anti-terror laws were woeful pieces of legislation. Some of these laws were used for completely different purposes from what they were intended.

The police also misused them against peaceful protesters.

https://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/human-rights/justice-and-fair-trials/stop-and-search/section-44-terrorism-act

It became a farce, lots of police threatening journalists with arrest for using cameras in strategic locations like railway stations. The case for anti-terror legislation seems more to take the heat of the government than a much needed law to catch would-be terrorists.

Then there is, of course, the extradition treaty with the US…another law that rarely managed to achieve its aims, but nonetheless succeeded in imprisoning individuals who had nothing to do with terrorism. Cameron was careful not to commit himself, I suspect he is well aware, he can’t deliver substance in terms of new laws , if recent history is our guide.

However, he will come under pressure. The tabloid papers are very good at finding religious nutcases who will issue all kinds of threats on demand. Cameron needs laws that will shut them up. This one was guilty of writing dodgy poetry:

12

Not quite. About 550 million. Still, a lot.

The point is that the removal of the right of entry and abode preceded independence, and an independent citizenship. In some cases, independence never came; there are still significant classes of UK citizen who have no right of entry and abode in the UK. They aren’t stateless; they have UK citizenship. Just not the kind of UK citizenship that gets you into the UK.

Oh, I agree, it’s appalling. My point is just that it’s not novel. Lots of people who are UK citizens by birth have been deprived of the right of entry and abode in the UK. I think this will be the first occasion on which anyone who is a UK citizen by virtue of birth in the UK will be so deprived, but even to point that out implies that the UK already has a second-class citizenship for people not born in the UK, which would hardly be something to boast about.

These are good questions. I don’t think we have answers to them yet, because the government hasn’t laid out its proposals in any detail. The main glaringly unanswered question for me is, where does Mr Cameron think the people he excludes will go? As British citizens they have a right of entry into any other EU country; if he thinks the EU will let him offload the citizens he doesn’t want in this way, he hasn’t thought very deeply about this.

13

There’s another issue here, which is that the UK currently does not have exit controls which would allow them to inspect the passports of everyone departing. They could introduce them, of course, but they would have to either withdraw from the Common Travel Area with Ireland - and reinstate controls along the land border - or Ireland would have to introduce its own exit controls and assist the UK in enforcing this power. The former is unthinkable, the latter less so, but I don’t know that Ireland has agreed to it (yet).

14

As to the UDHR, there’s a school of thought that it has become part of customary international law, but I’d guess the Cameron government doesn’t subscribe to that.

15

We’ll find out when Britain attempts to exclude a British Citizen flying in from (say) Abu Dhabi, on the grounds that they believe him to have been fighting in Syria. The airline will be required to carry him back to Abu Dhabi, from where the UAE government will promptly deport him. To where? Why, to the UK, of course; he’s a UK citizen, and the UAE government will take a Very Dim View if the UK government attempts to refuse to accept UK citizens deported from the UAE.

16

How is this supposed to work in a strictly pragmatic sense ?

A returning Jihadist arrives at Ankara airport, presents a valid, current UK passport and boards a flight to Heathrow.

At Heathrow,he’s stopped, his passport is seized and he’s told he’s no longer a British citizen. Then what ? Turkey won’t take him back, nor will anyone else.

The UK can expect zero cooperation from the Turkish authorities in identifying these people before they board flights to the UK, since obviously the Turks don’t want Jihadists either.

So what exactly is supposed to happen to these newly stateless individuals, given that they will nearly all be physically present in the UK, albeit at points of entry, and no other country will accept them ?

17

Nitpick: There’s been no suggestion that the people affected by this measure will be deprived of British citizenship; just of British passports. So your returning Jihadist will not be stateless. He will still be a British citizen. (And in fact the “seize their passports!” proposal relates to people attempting to leave Britain, rather than those attempting to return.)

It has, however, been suggested that British citizens returning to Britain who are suspected of having fought in a War We Don’t Like will be refused entry to Britain (passport or no passport). Which raises the question: where can they go instead?

I suspect Cameron is operating in a one-dimensional world in which the only people who could ever be suspected of fighting in Wars We Don’t Like already have dual nationality; they are British and Egyptian, say, or British and Nigerian. So they can be sent to Egypt or Nigeria. Alternatively, he intends a one-dimensional policy, in which by executive discretion this measure would simply not be invoked against people of purely English, Scottish, Welsh descent, no matter what we suspect they may have done in a War We Don’t Like.

18

Politicians can be accused of many things but the top ones are clearly not stupid and neither are the senior civil servants advising them. We already know from the London bombings that it is perfectly possible for British born and raised, single nationality citizens, to be radicalised to the point of mass murder.

Personally I think the strong measures are needed as another terrorist bombing of that type is pretty much inevitable and returning IS fighters are a likely source of immediate or future terror acts. Better that we stop them before they go out there but if not we need to make sure they are intercepted on the way back.

19

Everything you say is true, or at least plausible. But that just highlights the silliness, or at any rate incompleteness, of Cameron’s proposal. If we have a single nationality British citizen returning from suspected involvement in a foreign war on behalf of Someone We Don’t Like, how is he proposing to exclude them from the UK? What country does he imagine will admit a foreigner who cannot be returned to his home country? And if Cameron does attempt to offload these people on countries that have no obligation to accept them, what does he imagine that will do to the value and reputation of a British passport? Why should any sovereign nation accept a British passport as a credible travel document if, having admitted British passport holders, they may be unable to return them to the UK?

Cameron may well need to take some measures here, but they need to be measures that make some kind of sense. At the moment what he is announcing looks like something calculated to play well with the Daily Mail reader rather than something that will actually acheive anything for the public benefit.

20

Politicians announcing ill-formed and embryonic policy without sufficient forethought?

say it ain’t so! :slight_smile:

We the public make a rod for our own back here to a certain extent. We want action to be taken but aren’t prepared to wait for it to be worked through. Hence we get knee-jerk, policy-on-the-hoof. I have no doubt that Cameron knows he can’t make UK citizens stateless and is merely taking the toughest possible stance with the expectation that he has to row back to a less severe position when reality sets in.

My own opinion is that we can and should take passports off those we reasonably suspect of going to fight for IS (et al). For returning fighters we should allow them in and apply due process of law.
If evidence is hard to come by then by all means beef up the security services funding to allow us to better gather the evidence and put those suspected under surveillance as required. That funding could be found by avoiding the guaranteed legal bun-fights that would follow should we actually choose to make UK citizens stateless.