By Rodger Shanahan Thursday 26 February 2015
Photo: We should look at the stripping of dual nationality as a military and intelligence targeting issue. (AFP: Ho/ISIS)
Stripping Australian citizenship from home-grown terrorists who are dual nationals would free our authorities from certain legal shackles and allow them to act against the radicals, writes Rodger Shanahan.
The Prime Minister's national security statement included a reference to the possible stripping of citizenship from dual citizens.
There has been criticism that such a move will be ineffectual. Peter Hughes said it was of limited use because, even though the individuals would be prevented from returning to Australia, they "would be free to pursue extremist causes and political violence elsewhere". And in the Sydney Morning Herald, Professor Matthew Gibney from Oxford University argued against the move from a civil libertarian perspective, saying that "denationalisation is thus open to the same criticism that Voltaire made of the practice in 18th century France: namely, that it simply constitutes throwing into our neighbour's yard those stones that incommode us in our own".
This largely echoed a piece from last year by Sydney University's Professor Ben Saul.
While I acknowledge these points, they would carry more weight if the proposal to strip citizenship rendered the person stateless. The subject's failure to renounce another citizenship they possess indicates that they must continue to hold some attachment to that country, and as a continuing citizen of it, they would continue to have an identity and the safeguards afforded by that country.
The civil libertarian argument, however, fails to address what I would argue is a more serious issue: the potential eradication of targeting constraints for Australian intelligence agencies and military forces in dealing with Australian citizens engaged in terrorist activities overseas.
The possession of Australian citizenship rightly imposes limitations on how much information Australia's spy agencies can collect, and perhaps more importantly who they can share it with. There have already been legislative amendments to strengthen the intelligence-collection powers of these agencies, but dealing with non-citizens gives them much greater flexibility in sharing information.
So, rather than dual citizens simply becoming someone else's problem or able to undertake violent actions elsewhere, such a move may actually free up Australian authorities to address the problem by sharing information on foreign fighters or terrorists who were formerly Australian citizens.
This may simply mean that the former dual citizen can be arrested and jailed, or deported to their remaining country of nationality. But it may also mean they are killed in a counter-terrorist military operation.
In fact, there has been criticism in the UK that people stripped of their citizenship have been killed in drone strikes shortly after, and that the information that enabled their targeting was only released to the US after they were no longer UK citizens. I think this is the more appropriate discussion to be having, rather than a civil libertarian one.
To take one possible example, would the Australian public be happy to see a former dual Lebanese-Australian citizen born and raised in Sydney, but now simply a Lebanese citizen because they are fighting for Islamic State, killed in a RAAF bombing mission in Iraq based on intelligence gathered by Australian agencies? I think the public would accept this.
None of the steps proposed by the Government represents a silver bullet, but incremental changes to our ability to respond represent an appropriate answer to a unique challenge. Radical jihadists are not Islamic nationalists; they recognise no authority but their interpretation of what God commands them to do.
They are by definition and by action intolerant and they are as far removed from the humanist traditions of the Western societies from which some of them emerged as it is possible to be. And while Australian dual citizens fail to recognise the authority of the Commonwealth and kill in God's name, they are protected by the fact that they are citizens of a Commonwealth whose authority they have plainly rejected.
For those relatively few to whom this situation applies, we should look at the stripping of dual nationality as a military and intelligence targeting issue rather than simply a civil libertarian issue.
This article was originally published by Lowy Institute's The Interpreter. Read the original article here.
Associate Professor Rodger Shanahan is a research fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy.
The real benefit of stripping citizenship - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
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