CITIZENSHIP IN THE AGE OF TERROR
With the threat of homegrown extremism on the rise, citizenship is entering new and uncharted waters. Long seen as “an extended arm of immigration and border control”, it is now evolving into a “control and punishment measure” to be deployed against those who engage, or threaten to engage, in serious terrorism related activity. This essay addresses whether this evolution is an appropriate response to the challenge of terrorism, and how it should be managed, by examining a recent Australian proposal to strip citizenship from dual national terrorists (the Allegiance Bill).
The Allegiance Bill provides for three grounds upon which a dual national will have their Australian citizenship revoked: (1) acting ‘inconsistently
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As a student, I tackled issues affecting disadvantaged members of the university community as the University of Sydney Union Social Justice Convenor, drafted parliamentary submissions on legislative and policy proposals at the Sydney Centre for International Law, and assisted one of Australia’s foremost international human rights lawyers in making a successful UN Human Rights Committee complaint about the indefinite detention of refugees. I also edited two academic journals – the Sydney Law Review and Dissent – and held senior leadership positions at one of Australia’s largest youth-run organisations, the Australian Youth Climate …show more content…
Impact litigation is rare here compared to other common law jurisdictions. Cases that are run are usually small-scale and lack an organising political framework. Perhaps for this reason, Australian test cases have generally fallen short of achieving meaningful social or political change. By contrast, U.S. test cases are typically deployed as part of a larger strategy by civil rights groups and have an impressive track record for advancing the rights of the marginalised. An example is the recent U.S. Supreme Court litigation which resulted in the legalisation of gay