Australia: Stripping of citizenship a loss in more ways than one
2016/04/19 1 Comment
Australian law professor George Williams on the lack of due process in citizenship revocation in cases of terror or treason:
The job of resolving whether a person has engaged in conduct like this would ordinarily fall to a judge. We ask judges to take on this role because a person should only lose their liberty or rights in a democracy as a result of a fair process and a decision by an independent person. In the case of serious crimes involving the possibility of imprisonment, members of the community are also involved through service on a jury.
The Allegiance to Australia Act confounds these understandings. It confers no powers upon judges or juries, instead leaving a vacuum when it comes to determining whether someone has fallen foul of the law. The government has inserted the Citizenship Loss Board into this gap.
This results in a breach of traditional legal principles such as the rule of law and the separation of powers. Unnamed government officials are left to determine whether a person should be banished from the country. To use the words of Chief Justice Warren of the US Supreme Court, public servants are able to impose a punishment involving “the total destruction of the individual’s status in organised society”.
The creation of the Citizenship Loss Board is an Orwellian development, and yet another indication of Australia’s willingness to compromise good governance and basic rights in the name of the war on terror. Measures such as this show how we are losing our sense of perspective. Our goal in countering terrorism is not to maximise security by creating a police state, but to preserve a liberal democracy that safeguards liberties such as freedom of speech and the right to a fair trial. We must not compromise these important democratic values in the name of preserving them.
Our leaders would do well to recall the words of Prime Minister Robert Menzies on September 7 1939, four days after he announced that Australia was at war with Nazi Germany. In introducing an extraordinary new law to safeguard the nation’s security, he warned that in the battles to come “there must be as little interference with individual rights as is consistent with concerted national effort”. He concluded that “the greatest tragedy that could overcome a country would be for it to fight a successful war in defence of liberty and to lose its own liberty in the process”.
Source: Stripping of citizenship a loss in more ways than one
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Multicultural Meanderings 
Thank you for sharing this article, with which I very much concur. I especially like the last sentence with the quotation from Robert Menzies back in 1939: this is exactly what I fear has been happening in other countries, including Canada – fighting a war in defense of liberty and losing its own in the process. I hope that revocation of citizenship will not be allowed by other means than the justice system.