How the idea of ​​criminal deprivation of citizenship is distributed in Europe

The plans were incubated by the Swedish right-wing government with the support of its far-right supporters and have caused sensation around the world. Politicians say they are working to deprive citizenship from convicted dual nationals.

This implies a wider dialogue in capitals around the world. As far-right and nationalist parties steadily gain political stance, analysts say citizenship is increasingly linked to crime, causing a shift that has the potential to create two types of citizens and marginalize specific communities.

Christian Joppke, a professor of sociology at the University of Bern, said the roots of these changes can be traced back to the early 2000s, when the British government (then led by Tony Blair) began to use citizenship as a privilege rather than a right.

The British government regards citizenship as something “earning”, making it hard to obtain and more likely to lose. “The idea of ​​getting citizenship is that if you do something wrong, you should be able to lose it, too,” Chopk said, adding that recent recommendations in countries like Sweden, Finland and Germany seem to go a step further. “The new proposal now shows that if you take any serious crimes, this should also allow for the withdrawal of citizenship – which is very new.”

A few days after Sweden announced plans to eventually change the constitution so that people who commit crimes such as Swedish passports are convicted of crimes, a handful of politicians in Iceland began calling for similar changes to convicted serious offenders. A few months ago, the Dutch government said it was exploring the possibility of revoking citizenship for serious crimes with “anti-Semitism”.

Friedrich Merz, whose win in the vote, was a cameo in Friedrich Merz in the February general election in Germany, with his center right-wing CDU/CSU group winning the vote.

The proposal was quickly criticized, and one political commentator pointed out that it would lead to “German” in some people’s lives. “They will never really be Germans,” journalist and political commentator Gilda Sahebi wrote on social media. “A mistake, a crime – their German language disappeared.” “Whether they were born here or their family lived in Germany for generations.”

She added that Meers’ idea revealed the normalization of “racist discrimination” because “in other words” he called for immigration – a concept that was long-standing concept by far-right, anti-immigrant parties, in Germany, in which immigrants, including German citizens were called for mass deportation.

It is no coincidence for Joppke that citizenship is reconstituted, just as the far right is tightening power across the continent. Instead, he describes it as one of several options for politicians on the right side of the spectrum. “Can the state promise? The golden age of democracy once promised every family, a house, a stable job. Now it’s all gone.”

Instead, the government introduced the most basic type of security: physical security. “This is a toolbox that is closely related to the radical right,” he said. “Mainstream parties just really want not to vote by them.”

European governments have tried for years to deprive citizens of those who commit terrorism, providing a window into the extended link between nationality and crime.

Tanya Mehra, senior researcher at the Hague International Counter-Terrorism Centre, said that the proposal to link citizenship to terrorism has been greatly applied to dual nationals because international law restricts the statelessness of the government that makes people stateless. “But the question is, aren’t you making a distinction based on the fact that someone has one or two ethnic groups and thus creates different classes of citizens?”

She said the law makes dual citizens vulnerable to the same crime if they serve their sentences and then face revocation of citizenship. “The great media is saying you are taking a strong stance on crime by depriving them of their nationality,” Mehra said. “But you have to look more carefully at whether you have violated their human rights.”

Her research examines cases in which people’s belief in terrorism was revoked, found a minority and then trapped in the country, deprived them of citizenship after other countries of nationality.

This situation pushed them underground, making it easier for terrorists or criminal groups to exploit them, but officials were unable to track them. “They’re gone in the illegal,” she said. “You’re creating backfire.”

In Denmark, after years of terrorist citizenship, treason and threats to the state, the law has been expanded in 2021 to include gang-related crimes, and it is hard to say whether these changes have lowered the level of crime.

“In terms of qualitative or quantitative data, there is not much that indicates that an individual (other desire to commit crime) is somehow blocked by these changes,” he said.

But it is clear that the policy provides a “legal framework” for long-standing xenophobic public discourse, a discourse that mistakenly attempts to connect immigration to crime. “The problem with these changes is that it perpetuates problematic perceptions that ancestors and races play a role in determining crime,” he said.

What emerges is an overly simple view of crime, which ignores countless studies that find no significant link between immigration levels and crime rates across Europe.

The senator said Denmark was the first to link citizenship to serious crimes a few years later, many people have had a serious impact.

“Anti-immigrant discourse that has been around for many years has enhanced this unnecessary feeling in Denmark,” he added. “These laws remind many people how weak inclusion is in Danish society and how easily these ties to Denmark are cut off.”