UK home secretary wants to overturn human rights treaties and make terror suspects stateless

Blue rinsers, I’d imagine. Gen-x probably went for Clegg, after being utterly disillusioned with Blairism. To my eternal shame, I did…

Yes, it has. Trial has the annoying properties that:

  • it’s costly
  • you need to present evidence
  • Habeus Corpus gets in the way of arbitrary detention

Worse than that though:

  • the accused is presumed innocent
  • the accused can challenge your evidence
  • the accused can call witnesses in their own defence
  • the accused even has legal council!

and then:

  • the judge and jury still might not do what you want.

Much better to declare the accused sub-human / non-citizen / drone-target!

Or in the UK, rely on TPIMs “Terrorism Prevention Orders” which can be issued on the basis of no facts whatsoever! … and which are therefore hard to challenge in a court of law (the evidence, being secret, cannot be divulged).

6 Likes

No fly means no fly to the us, no passport means no cross border movement (in most of the world).

Nay, the best of all possible worlds

Good on her. They want the luxury of multiple citizenships, what the heck did they think could happen? They didn’t commit to a country so it certainly owes them NADA.

What does it mean “to commit to a country”?

And since when were multiple citizenships a “luxury”?

C’mon. You came to play - so play.

6 Likes

“May” … I see what you did there. Couldn’t help yourself, could you?

We’re getting very off topic now, but lower lying areas Scandinavia, anywhere south of, say, Lillehammer, has the pretty much the same climate as England.
Oslo, where I grew up, is at any given point roughly 3 degrees colder than London where I currently live.

1 Like

Interesting!

1 Like

a “privilege, not a right”

This seems to be the generic British Govt. description for everything.

6 Likes

So if you lose your citizenship, do you get to stop paying taxes?

Only by dint of the fact that you can’t be lawfully employed as a non-citizen.

1 Like

IIRC there was a British born “traitor” in WWII who had emigrated to Germany before the war and renounced his British citizenship. He was ultimately executed by the British for treasonous offences (though I doubt it was officially “treason”). My late father, who grew up during the Blitz, recalled that event and said that at the time the reasoning was along the lines of “If you’re born under the crown, you can die under it - no amount of renunciation will ever change the fact that you are a subject of the crown”. The traitor was not “Haw-Haw” William Joyce, but he’s the one google keeps suggesting, but he was born in the States before emigrating to Germany. Does anyone remember who this was? I only remember this as I emigrated to the US from the UK, and my dad told it to me when I was looking to join the Army during Gulf War I - as a way to remind me that even if I become a US citizen, I’m still British and can be recalled at any time. Granted, my friends used to like to jest that if the US and UK went to war I could kill myself and be a hero on both sides. Jerks.

Strictly speaking, taking away somebody’s passport doesn’t make them stateless, it makes them passportless. Hell, most people don’t even have a passport unless they plan to travel, given the cost and all the loopholes they have to jump through to get one.

That said, it is seriously problematic when done against somebody who hasn’t actually been found guilty of a crime. Even more so given that the definition of “terrorist” is rapidly expanding to include anyone the government has a beef with, whether or not the person is suspected of doing something that’s actually illegal.

Yes, do we need to expand the scope of ‘terrorism’ to include all minor civil infractions. Build an out-house without planning permission? That’s terrorism! Have an affiliation with Greenpeace? That’s terrorism! Lobby outside the house of the managing director of your place of work? That’s terrorism! Park on a double yellow line? That’s terrorism!

In Falkirk, which used [information gathering powers granted to fight terrorism] 380 times, citizens could be spied on for noise nuisance, littering, if they were suspected of driving a taxi without a licence, for breaching the smoking ban and if their expense claims were thought to be exaggerated.

Does that mean we can send all those Germans we’ve got cluttering up the Royal Palaces back?

1 Like

I don’t know about you, but I’m an American. And at least here in America, what constitutes treason is outlined specifically in our constitution, as well as the level of proof required to convict. That pesky document also defines citizenship. So if you’ll excuse me, I’ll look to that for guidance as opposed to the completely arbitrary amateur-hour TV justice you seem to be so fond of.

2 Likes

It’s the parents that usually create dual nationality for a child - typically by getting them a passport for the second country. In most cases, you have little say in it, and you’d have to try to renounce the second nationality when you became an adult.

… and in the modern world, what with nations seeking to undermine established principles of justice and the rule of law, it might strike many people that this kind of insurance policy is a rather good idea.

It wouldn’t matter even if it were a right. A few years ago, every time a politician mentioned the word ‘right’, he or she included the parenthetic remark ‘but with rights come responsibilities’ (one could actually hear the training wheels as they said it). Which is of course utter nonsense. Rights aren’t contingent, but our citizenry has been encouraged to believe they are.

1 Like