Protective Revocation: Reconciling Human Rights and National Security in UK Counter-Terrorism

The United Kingdom’s counter-terrorism strategy is caught in a tragic impasse, forcing a choice between the punitive, exclusionary act of citizenship revocation and the state’s use of lethal force against its own citizens. While extensive scholarship critiques citizenship stripping as discriminatory and rights diminishing, it offers no resolution to this dilemma. This paper addresses this critical gap by advancing a novel, albeit contentious, argument: that in specific, narrowly defined circumstances, citizenship revocation can be reconceptualised not as a punitive tool but as a protective, life-preserving measure. The central thesis is that for individuals with access to an alternative nationality who are on a foreseeable path to a lethal confrontation with the state, pre-emptive revocation of their UK citizenship could serve to uphold their most fundamental human right, the right to life, by removing them from the jurisdiction where that life is in imminent peril. Grounding this claim in a critical re-evaluation of Arendt’s right to have rights and a radical inversion of the principle of non-refoulement, this paper argues for a situational hierarchy where the biological right to life must precede the institutional right to nationality. This theoretical intervention reframes revocation as the fulfilment of prospective duty of care. It disrupts the established binary of state power versus individual rights, offering a pragmatic, albeit ethically complex framework for reconciling the state's security duties with its most basic human rights obligations in an era of intractable terrorist threats.