\n<\/p>\n
The plans, hatched by Sweden\u2019s rightwing government with support of its far-right backers, made waves around the world. Politicians said they were working to strip citizenship from dual nationals who had been convicted of some crimes.<\/p>\n
It was a hint of a broader conversation taking place in capitals around the world. As far-right and nationalist parties steadily gain<\/a> political ground, analysts say that citizenship is increasingly being linked to crime, giving rise to a shift that risks creating two classes of citizens and marginalising specific communities.<\/p>\n The roots of these changes can be traced back partly to the early 2000s when the UK government \u2013 led at the time by Tony Blair \u2013 began casting citizenship<\/a> as a privilege rather than a right, said Christian Joppke, a sociology professor at the University of Bern.<\/p>\n The UK government posited citizenship as something to be \u201cearned\u201d, making it harder to obtain and easier to lose. \u201cThis idea of earned citizenship is that if you do wrong, you should also be able to lose it,\u201d said Joppke. Recent proposals put forward in countries such as Sweden, Finland and Germany seemingly take this one step further, he added. \u201cThe new proposals now suggest that if you do any kind of serious crime, that should also allow for the possibility to withdraw citizenship \u2013 that is quite new.\u201d<\/p>\n Days after Sweden announced plans<\/a> to eventually change the constitution so that people convicted of crimes like espionage or treason could be stripped of their Swedish passports, a handful of politicians in Iceland began calling<\/a> for similar changes for those convicted of serious crimes. Months earlier, the Dutch government said i<\/a>t was exploring the possibility of revoking citizenship<\/a> for serious crimes that have \u201can antisemitic aspect\u201d.<\/p>\n The concept also made a cameo in Germany\u2019s February election after Friedrich Merz \u2013 whose centre-right CDU\/CSU bloc emerged victorious in the ballot \u2013 told the newspaper Welt<\/a> it should be possible to revoke German citizenship in the case of dual nationals who commit criminal offences.<\/p>\n The proposal was swiftly criticised, with one political commentator pointing out that it would result in some being \u201cGermans on probation\u201d for their entire lives. \u201cThey can never truly be German. One mistake, one crime \u2013 and their Germanness is gone,\u201d the journalist and political commentator Gilda Sahebi wrote on social media. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if they were born here or if their family has lived in Germany for generations.\u201d<\/p>\n Merz\u2019s idea, she added, had laid bare the normalisation of \u201cracist discrimination\u201d in that, \u201cin other words,\u201d he was calling for remigration \u2013 the concept long-peddled<\/a> by far-right, anti-immigrant parties and which, in Germany, calls for the mass deportation of migrants, including those with German citizenship.<\/p>\n For Joppke, it was little coincidence that citizenship was being reframed just as the far-right was tightening its grip on power across the continent. Instead, he described it as one of the few options for politicians on the right of the spectrum. \u201cWhat can states promise? The golden age of democracy once promised two cars per family, a house, a stable job. Now all this is gone,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Instead governments had homed in on the most basic type of security: physical security. \u201cThis is the toolbox which is intimately connected to the agenda of the radical right,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd mainstream parties are just very anxious not to be outvoted by them.\u201d<\/p>\n For years, governments across Europe have sought to strip citizenship from those convicted of terrorism, offering a window on to how the expanded link between nationality and crime could play out.<\/p>\n Because international law limits governments from rendering people stateless, the proposals linking citizenship to terrorism have been largely applied to dual nationals, said Tanya Mehra, a senior research fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague. \u201cBut then the question is, aren\u2019t you making a distinction on the basis of whether someone has one or two nationalities, and thus creating different classes of citizens?\u201d<\/p>\n The law leaves dual nationals vulnerable to being punished twice for the same crime, if they serve prison time and then also face having their citizenship revoked, she said. \u201cIt\u2019s great media optics to say that you\u2019re taking a strong stance against crime by depriving them of their nationality,\u201d said Mehra. \u201cBut you have to really look more carefully at whether or not you\u2019re violating their human rights.\u201d<\/p>\n Her research had delved into cases of people\u2019s citizenship being revoked over terrorism convictions, finding a small number who were then left stranded in the country that had stripped them of citizenship after the country of their other nationality refused to take them in. \u201cThat means they basically become illegal,\u201d she said, losing their right to stay and work in the country.<\/p>\n The situation pushes them underground, making it easier for terrorist or criminal groups to potentially exploit them but also harder for officials to track them. \u201cThey disappear into the illegality,\u201d she said. \u201cYou\u2019re creating a situation that is counterproductive.\u201d<\/p>\n In Denmark, where, after years of revoking citizenship for terrorism, treason and threats to the state, the law was expanded<\/a> in 2021 to include gang-related crime, it was difficult to say whether the changes had pushed down crime levels, said Somdeep Sen, an associate professor at Denmark\u2019s Roskilde University.<\/p>\n \u201cThere isn\u2019t much out there in terms of qualitative or quantitative data that shows that individuals \u2013 otherwise keen to commit crime \u2013 have somehow been deterred by these changes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But what was clear was that the policy had provided \u201clegal framing\u201d for the longstanding, xenophobic public discourse that had falsely sought to link immigration to crime. \u201cThe issue with these changes is that it perpetuates the problematic perception that ancestry and ethnicity play a role in determining criminality,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n What emerged was an overly simplistic view of crime, one that overlooks the myriad of research <\/a>that has found<\/a> no significant link<\/a> between immigration levels and crime rates across Europe.<\/p>\n Years after Denmark had been among the first to tie citizenship to serious crimes, the impact had been sharply felt by many, said Sen.<\/p>\n \u201cAlready, the years of anti-immigration discourse has heightened this feeling of unwanted-ness in Denmark,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd such laws remind many of how tenuous their inclusion in Danish society is and how easily these ties to Denmark can be severed.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n