Liberty's Second Reading Briefing on the Counter-Terrorism & Security Bill in the House of Commons

26. A policy which prevents British citizens from returning to this country, for any period,
throws up further principled and practical concerns. During the period between passport
invalidation and the conditional return date, the individual is – for all practical purposes –
stripped of citizenship. In the case of dual nationals stripped of British citizenship under
current powers whilst abroad, there is chilling evidence that they have fallen victim to extrajudicial
killing or been effectively kidnapped by the US authorities without any form of due
process. A troubling lack of transparency on the part of Government around the plight of
those deprived of British citizenship, means the information we do have is largely attributable
to freedom of information requests and the efforts of investigative journalists. The work of the
Bureau of Investigative journalism has revealed that the deaths of British-Lebanese citizen
Bilal al-Berlawi and British-Egyption Mohamed Sakr in US drone strikes followed shortly after
the men were stripped of British nationality. 37 The Government has chosen to “neither
confirm nor deny” the allegation that it shares the information with the Americans for the
purpose of facilitating drone strikes. 38
27. Liberty is deeply concerned by policies of exceptionality which impose arbitrary
punishments on individuals at moments of extreme vulnerability, by-passing due process
safeguards. We now have a plethora of terrorism offences on the statute book, including
offences which criminalise training or fighting with terror groups abroad. Further, the
Government’s most recent criminal justice Bill, the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill,
increases the maximum sentences for a number of terrorism-related offences to life
imprisonment and introduces a restrictive parole regime to offences of this nature. In the
words of the late Lord Kingsland, former Conservative Shadow Lord Chancellor:
“Why should such a person not be prosecuted in the normal way in our criminal
courts instead Why on earth should the Secretary of State be given this discretion to
pick somebody out of the normal judicial process and deal with him by his own
subjective judgement.” 39
28. Liberty understands the importance of international intelligence operations to the fight
against terrorism. We further understand that this requires systems of notification, which
place obligations on carriers to alert the UK authorities of the international movements of
suspects. On return, suspects can be subjected more easily to close surveillance and arrests
37 Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Former British citizens killed by drone strikes after passports
revoked, Chris Woods and Alice K.Ross, 27th February 2013.
38 Legal Advice of Jemima Stratford QC, paragraph 3: http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2014/01/APPG-Final.pdf.
39 Lords Hansard, 9 October 2002, Column 277.