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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the practice of citizenship revocation for terror in Europe, developed in response to the “foreign fighter” phenomenon where thousands of European citizens joined Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq. This challenges how citizenship is legally constructed.

Paper long abstract

European states are stepping away from unwanted citizens. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has been upholding member states’ determinations to revoke citizenship for citizens convicted of terror crimes. Due to international law prohibiting statelessness, citizenship revocation is only possible when citizens enjoy more than one citizenship. This has resulted in a deeply uneven juridical practice, where citizens with diverse heritage ties can be punished in ways that citizens with singular citizenship cannot and will not be. In practice, this is often racialized, such as when Denmark repatriated white Danish-only citizens from camps in Syria but not non white Danish plus citizens (as Denmark was able to revoke their Danish citizenship).

This paper examines the practice of citizenship revocation for terror in Europe through its framing by the ECtHR. This new practice was developed in response to the “foreign fighter” phenomenon where thousands of European citizens joined Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq prior to IS’ territorial defeat in 2019. The paper demonstrates that the emerging citizenship revocation jurisprudence from the ECtHR upends decades of rights constructions around citizenship and belonging, and represents a significant threat to human rights constructions in Europe. This represents a (re)colonialization through law, and the paper engages with decolonialization arguments to examine this emerging legal European practice.