High Court sends citizenship laws back to the drawing board
It’s troubling to treat dual citizens as more vulnerable to loss of citizenship, and for those rights to be protected only through a constitutional separation-of-powers principle.
Two major citizenship cases involving dual citizens convicted of criminal offences were handed down by the High Court last week, but with strikingly different outcomes.
The first involved Algerian-born Abdul Nacer Benbrika, who arrived in Australia in 1989 in his late 20s, becoming a citizen in 1998. Ten years later he was convicted of terrorism offences by the Supreme Court of Victoria. On the day his sentence expired, then-home affairs minister Peter Dutton “ceased” Benbrika’s Australian citizenship, relying on section 36D(1) of the Citizenship Act – a section introduced in the 2015 amendments focusing on allegiance to Australia as a measure for stripping citizenship.
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Kim Rubenstein is a Professor in the Faculty of Business, Government and Law at the
University of Canberra and author of Australian Citizenship Law.
