Terrorists  should  lose  their  citizenships.

There are democratic countries in the world who will rescind the citizenship of their citizens if those citizens are at war with their own countries.

Suppose you are a citizen of a country and you decide to commit treason against that country. During a time of war, you would be executed. By choosing to be a terrorist, your attack is against society as a whole. By being a terrorist, you have, quite literally, waged war on your own country because your country is at war with terrorists.

You have renounced any attachment to your own country in the most forceful means imaginable. You are not just indifferent toward your own country and the people in it but you are actively hostile against your fellow citizens. The passport you hold means nothing to you, beyond making it easier for you to carry out your attacks on other countries. You obviously view your fellow citizens as enemies and couldn’t care less that your crimes against people will also include citizens of your own country.  

The question that comes to the fore is this. Should you then be entitled to claim the benefit of the citizenship of your own country? In particular, should you be entitled to do so while remaining a terrorist in another country?

A private member’s bill in the Canadian Parliament sponsored by Conservative MP Devinder Shory and co-sponsored by Kenny, the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration would withdraw Canadian citizenship from dual citizens who engage in an act of war against the Canadian Forces.  It would be no different than making an an application for renunciation of their Canadian citizenship.

The Citizenship minister, Jason Kenney, has proposed expanding the bill’s scope to include acts of terrorism. This is hardly a theoretical possibility. Recent weeks have furnished at least one and possibly two examples of terrorist attacks—one in Bulgaria, the other in Algeria by Canadian citizens. It is however possible that the crimes committed by the terrorists were  foreign citizens who somehow held Canadian passports.

Meanwhile, the Globe and Mail (one of Canada’s largest newspapers) was appalled that anyone should have their citizenship stripped from them, for any reason. “Taking away citizenship is not something we do,” it advised. “It is something more often associated with countries like the Soviet Union.”

That is hogwash.

The concern some people have can be put aside most easily. To the question, where do you draw the line, the answer is that is precisely the purpose of law: drawing lines. In this case, the line is drawn at crimes of terrorism that are, by their nature, assaults on the very notion of citizenship.

The practice is in fact common among democratic countries, including Australia, the United Kingdom  and Canada. Section 10 of the Canadian Citizenship Act provides for deprivation of citizenship where it has been obtained by “false representation or fraud or by knowingly concealing material circumstances.”

However, I would be remiss if I didn’t add that so far, there is no law in Canada that permits the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration to turf Canadians out of Canada if they are convicted terrorists. That is indeed unfortunate because in Canada, we have convicted terrorists still  living in Canada. 

The proposal to turf any Canadian who is a terrorist just doesn’t apply just to those who had to apply for their citizenship, it applies to those who became citizens by birth. The Shory-Kenney bill does not distinguish between Canadian-born and naturalized citizens. Rather, it distinguishes between those who are citizens of Canada only, however they came to be so, and those who hold citizenship in two or more countries at the same time.

If this is discrimination, it is of the most highly circumscribed kind. The only way in which dual citizens would ever run afoul of this law would be by committing crimes of such severity, and so expressly directed against the Canadian state, as to convey a profound contempt for the very thing of which they might thereby be dispossessed: their Canadian citizenship. In my opinion, terrorists who commit acts of terrorism in Canada or any other country should lose the citizenship of their own country since they are at war with every country that denounces terrorism.

Would the courts see it differently?  I will refer you to a letter I emailed to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration.  I said in part;

“Now there are some who will say that this conflicts with our Charter of Rights. I refer you to Justice Laskin of the Supreme Court of Canada in Curr v. The Queen. He said in part;

“Given a constitutional Charter, will the courts now undertake the task of updating both past and future laws? If the courts do assume this role, section 1 of the Charter provides a standard in which they will discharge their responsibility.” unquote 

“The Supreme Court in 1970 when dealing with the appeal of R.v. Drybones said in part;

“In the traditional British system that is our own by virtue of the British North American Act, the responsibility for updating statutes in this changing world rests exclusively with Parliament. The adoption of the Charter means that it can be shared with the courts.” unquote  

In my opinion, we could apply the same penalty of cancelling citizenship to all citizens, singular or dual. Admittedly   the risks making those who hold only the one citizenship stateless would be in violation of international conventions to which we are signatories. However, that problem can be solved because stateless persons can apply for passports issued by the United Nations.

If a citizen of a country does not give total loyalty to that country, then the citizen who ignores that loyally should lose his or her right to remain a citizen of that country.  

If any of my readers feel that revoking the citizenship of a terrorist is unfair, consider this scenario.

Imagine if you will that a citizen in your country who is a terrorist, was charged with the crime of murder in another country and he was acquitted simply because of a technicality. He is then returned to your country. He cannot be tried again so a year later, he builds a bomb that is placed in a car that is later parked on one of your streets.  Then as you and your family are walking past the bomb, it explodes and you lose all four of your limbs and you also lose every one of the members of your family. You would probably ask yourself if it would have been better to deny him his continued citizenship in your country and permanently keep him out of your country. Of course, such reasoning by then would be moot if he was a suicide bomber.

In 1985 when I was addressing a United Nations crime conference in Milan, I suggested that the terrorists should be executed. Some of the countries have done that while others took them back into their own countries as citizens.  And yes, a number of those terrorists continued to kill innocent citizens. 

Turf them out of your countries if they are convicted terrorists. You don’t need them.