IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jlawss/v14y2025i2p12-d1605242.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Lawfulness of Citizenship Deprivation: Comparing Australia and the UK

Author

Listed:
  • Guy Baldwin

    (Department of Law, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9QQ, UK)

Abstract

The rise in international terrorism has led to a rise in citizenship deprivation. Depriving a person of citizenship represents a harsh national security measure. Although both Australia and the UK have citizenship deprivation legislation, the judicial response has differed. In Australia, two laws providing for deprivation of citizenship have been found unconstitutional. In the UK, significant challenges to citizenship deprivation decisions have failed, including those relating to Shamima Begum, deprived of UK citizenship in 2019, whose request for permission to appeal in respect of the decision was rejected by the UK Supreme Court in August 2024. In this context, it is striking that despite the lesser degree of human rights protection under the Australian Constitution and federal statutes compared with the UK, the Australian courts may have arrived at a significantly rights protective approach to citizenship deprivation, leading to an important procedural safeguard by requiring courts to make decisions on citizenship deprivation. This underlines interesting features of the Australian system, in which the development of doctrines under a written constitution that limits legislative power, such as through the separation of powers, can sometimes lead to significant (if uneven) rights protective outcomes. Short of a shift in UK constitutional law doctrine around the separation of powers (which is unlikely), the Australian decisions cannot be mirrored in the UK. However, they may point towards the possibility of stronger procedural safeguards in the context of citizenship deprivation, as well as some potential human rights law implications.

Suggested Citation

  • Guy Baldwin, 2025. "The Lawfulness of Citizenship Deprivation: Comparing Australia and the UK," Laws, MDPI, vol. 14(2), pages 1-21, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:gam:jlawss:v:14:y:2025:i:2:p:12-:d:1605242
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/14/2/12/pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/14/2/12/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jlawss:v:14:y:2025:i:2:p:12-:d:1605242. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.