Australia Proposed Reforms To Lower The Threshold Of Revoking Citizenship

15 Dec 2018

The recommended reforms in the law that seek to reduce the threshold for denying citizenship of Australia have sparked attention that these will reduce safeguards upon providing people stateless.

Earlier month, the federal government launched a bill into Australia parliament that, if passed, will make it simpler to remove an Australian of citizenship by:

• Lowering the demand that to trigger deprivation, a punishment or punishments result in an imprisonment term of minimum six years
• complicating and weakening protections upon the creation of statelessness.

These reforms are directly contrary to bipartisan suggestions of the Joint Committee of Parliamentary on security and Intelligence, contained in its report of Sept 2015. Those suggestions were followed when parliament included the present citizenship-stripping provisions into the Citizenship of Australia Act 2007 in Dec 2015.

Increasing the Scope, and Reducing the Threshold, for Withholding

The recommended reforms address what a previous Conversation piece referred to a citizenship deprivation which is conviction based, one of 03 mechanisms for denial included into the Act in 2015.

Of the offenses presently listed as possible triggers for deprivation, some are aimed at terrorism, and few are without that link (for example espionage and sabotage). All carry the highest sentence of 10 years or higher.

Complicating and Weakening, Protections upon Statelessness

The recommended reforms also reduce the safeguards on the statelessness creation. Presently, an individual can only be denied of citizenship below the provision if he or she “is a citizen or national of a nation different than Australia” at the time while the minister removes him or her Australian citizenship. It is to assure that the minister does not give the person stateless.

The proposed formulation replaces the satisfaction of minister with the facts of the matter. But below international law of Australia commitments on statelessness, the opinion of the minister is irrelevant. What matters is whether the individual is a citizen below the domestic law of the foreign nation concerned.

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