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The Countess of Mar: I listened closely to what my noble friend Lord Russell had to say. I heartily endorse every word. I am extremely concerned about this clause.

Lord Kingsland: We have tabled Amendment No. 70, which is in many ways similar to that tabled by the Liberal Democrats. We have also tabled a number of probing amendments.

I share the concerns so eloquently expressed by the noble Earl, Lord Russell. I should like to add one or two thoughts of my own. The first concerns Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which says that no one shall be subject to torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. I can think of no worse punishment, apart from the death penalty, than being expelled from one's country of birth with all its associations of home and family, institutions, landscape and other things. Have the Government considered whether that penalty on those born in the United Kingdom falls within Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights?

Article 7 is also relevant. It requires that offences should be sufficiently specific so that, if one contemplates an offence before carrying out a certain course of conduct, one should know, or be reasonably certain, whether that course of conduct would fall within the terms of the offence. As the noble Earl, Lord Russell, said, the offence here is cast in extremely vague terms: seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the United Kingdom and its dependent territories.

How can a citizen of the United Kingdom know in advance whether what he is about to do falls within these two definitions—especially since, as the noble Earl said, the individual who decides whether the conduct falls within these provisions is the Secretary of State deciding on purely subjective grounds?

Surely the proper forum for dealing with someone thought to have committed an offence under the new sections in Clause 4(1) is the criminal court where the

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burden of proof is clearly on the prosecution. It is for the Government to demonstrate to your Lordships' House why someone who is thought to have acted in a seriously prejudicial manner against the vital interests of the UK should not be tried in the criminal courts.

Finally, I turn to statelessness, of which there appears to be no definition in the Bill. I hope that the Government will enlighten us on what that means; for example, does it mean that a citizen of this country has no passport issued by another state, or has no right to a passport issued by another state, or do the Government have other criteria in mind in determining whether an individual is stateless?

Many people have dual nationality as a consequence of a set of circumstances over which they had no control. I know that one of the Government's arguments is that it is wrong to make a distinction between birth and naturalisation. But these situations seem so distinct that I wonder why the Government believe that is a cause for concern. In any event, surely the Government are introducing another form of discrimination between those born without another nationality and those born with dual nationality.

6.45 p.m.

Baroness Carnegy of Lour: I, too, do not understand how the Government can make no distinction between birth and the acquisition of citizenship by naturalisation. We all know in our bones that they are two different things. In his letter to the Select Committee on the Constitution, the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, says, on page 6 of the report, that such a distinction is,

"inconsistent with Article 7 of the European Convention on Nationality, which we hope to ratify in due course".

It would be interesting to know how much this decision has to do with the Government's intention to ratify that convention.

I agree with what my noble friend Lord Kingsland and the noble Earl, Lord Russell, said. I am very concerned about the ability to deprive people born British of their nationality in this way.

Lord Lester of Herne Hill: At Second Reading I presented the views of the Joint Select Committee on Human Rights on this and other provisions. I do not intend to repeat anything I said then. But there is one point I want to mention to the Committee that is not a lawyer's point; it is far more important. It is about the concept of British citizenship which is threatened with devaluation by the Bill. The Home Secretary has rightly spoken about the need for British citizens to understand what citizenship means: the positive content of citizenship and the duties that flow from it; the notion of allegiance to this country as well as the civil and political rights of citizens.

Until the law was amended we had a muddled concept of citizenship in this country. Citizenship of the United Kingdom and colonies was one concept; a strange, complicated, hybrid concept. We had the notion of Commonwealth citizenship. But we did not have the notion of British citizenship—that is to say,

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citizenship of this country. In that respect, we differed from other independent Commonwealth countries. It was, therefore, possible for a previous government in 1968 to take away the rights of entry of one group of British/Asian passport holders from East Africa. Indeed, that is the worst thing that I believe Parliament has done since the Second World War. It was held to be "degrading", in breach of Article 3 of the convention by the European Court of Human Rights in a case where I acted for the complainants.

There are some parts of the Bill that I believe to be admirable, but I have one worry about this part of the Bill. If, on subjective grounds where the material, if it is political, cannot be shown to an adjudicator but only to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission and then not shown to the individual concerned but to the special advocate—an attenuated form of appeal without judicial review—citizenship can be taken away on political grounds however sincere the motivation of a future Minister, that would send a message that the precious notion of "citizenship", which should be the right of people born in this country and of those who come to this country, can be taken away by a Minister of the Crown for reasons that he may regard as serious but which are not accompanied by full judicial process of law.

Leaving aside all the legal objections, it seems to me that the message that would go out to people is that British citizenship is some kind of commodity, not a matter of birthright, that Ministers can take away on political grounds, provided that there is no violation of the statelessness convention. That is not a sensible message to send to the new citizens of this country when other parts of the Bill are seeking to persuade them that equal citizenship, equal rights, and equal obligations are to be shared by all of us.

Therefore, when he replies, I hope that the Minister will not simply stand pat on the position that he took in a letter that he has kindly sent to me and other Members of the Committee, based on what the Joint Committee on Human Rights has said by way of criticism. This goes to a matter of political judgment about what "citizenship" means, and how precious it ought to be for all of us.

Lord Filkin: Clause 4 is one of the most important clauses for debate. As Members of the Committee have rightly said and as the Constitution Committee remarked, this clause touches on very important issues both to the state and to its citizens. There is no space for a full response to the thoughtful points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Lester, but the summary response is that the Government believe that citizenship is something of very significant meaning and value. During our previous discussion on Clause 1, we sought to try to make it have more meaning and to help more people come into citizenship with the ability to exercise the rights and responsibilities that flow therefrom.

In essence, the Government's position on those points is as follows. Because citizenship is a thing of value as well as something that confers rights, it also

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confers obligations. It is conceivable that there are circumstances in which a citizen has, by his actions, deprived himself of his entitlement to his rights. Therefore, it is right for citizenship to be denied. The latter is nothing new; indeed, it has been going on throughout the past century, albeit infrequently, as one would expect. Citizens have had their citizenship taken away from them by the government in the past.

Lord Avebury: When the matter was discussed in Standing Committee in another place, can the Minister confirm that Angela Eagle said then that there had been one case only where someone was a victim of a deprivation of citizenship under Section 40 of the 1981 Act?

Lord Filkin: I believe that I wrote to the noble Earl, Lord Russell, on this point. From my recollection, the last case was in 1973. However, there have been several hundred cases since 1915 when citizenship has been taken away from a citizen.

One of the debates is about whether there should be a distinction between the types of citizenship—in other words, whether people who have acquired citizenship as of birth should never be open to having it deprived, or whether the circumstances in which they might be open to having it deprived to them should be different from those applied to people who have acquired it through other means than birth.

In the White Paper we indicated our intention to modernise the provisions relating to citizenship. We saw this as a corollary of the importance now being attached to citizenship. The current law was drafted more than 20 years ago and, in many respects, is little different from that contained in earlier legislation

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