My Lords, that Clause 64 is highly contentious and far from obviously a good idea is perfectly plain. It is plain, indeed, from the Minister’s own recognition in Amendment 56A that a review of its operation will be required even if the provision is enacted. The critical difference between the Government’s amendment and our own is that we say that there should be no such drastic provision enacted as this without its first being subjected to full and proper consideration, and that of course would happen under our amendment. This really is a matter of fundamental principle.
It is true to say, as the Minister noted in Committee, that someone can already be made stateless if deprived of their citizenship having originally obtained naturalisation by fraud. That is perhaps understandable. The person would never have obtained British citizenship in the first place but for having committed fraud. To render stateless someone who has already properly gained citizenship by naturalisation is, I would suggest, quite another matter. Of course one must recognise that the power would arise only in respect of those who had betrayed the trust which we as a nation put in them when we granted them naturalisation and who now themselves create a risk to national security. For my part, I can readily see the temptation to say, “Well, they, too, therefore can properly be made stateless”. This is a temptation which I truly believe that, as a nation proud—and rightly proud—of our human rights record, we should resist.
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By all means, let the Government reverse the decision last year of the Supreme Court in Al-Jedda and legislate, as Lord Wilson in his judgment there implicitly suggested, to allow us to deprive someone of their British citizenship, provided that they can then immediately acquire the nationality of another state, as, indeed, it was assumed in the course of the litigation in that case that Mr Al-Jedda himself could have done. However, let us not—at any rate not without the most thorough and careful pre-legislative consideration—go down the road of adding to the numbers of those outlawed as stateless and put beyond the reach, therefore, of national protection at
all. Historically, it is the autocrats and dictators who habitually have rendered people stateless, while we have a proud record of resisting such measures and striving to minimise what Lord Wilson called in Al-Jedda, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has already reminded us, the “evil of statelessness”. As the noble Lord has explained, it is really highly doubtful whether making these individuals stateless would in fact make it easier to control their movements and contribute therefore to national security; rather, it might make it more difficult to remove them.
Whatever the position is on that, it is very unlikely that any possible advantage to national security could begin to compensate for the indisputable reputational damage that such a measure would occasion and the damage, therefore, that it would cause to our soft power. Our amendment makes a modest enough proposal: a Joint Committee before we take this drastic step. I urge your Lordships to accede to it.