Citizenship Revocation: A Spatial Perspective on a Citizenist Practice

This chapter advances a spatial perspective on citizenship revocation, arguing that denationalization should be understood not as a mere formal change in legal status, but as a loss of territorial access and, with it, the mobility capital on which effective rights protection depends. Surveying the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, it shows how the Court’s reasoning rests on a false premise of “citizenship equality”, treating all nationalities as if they afforded a comparable baseline of rights protection. The chapter argues that this obscures the profound and unequal consequences revocation may have for dual citizens, who are uniquely exposed to indirect discrimination and to a severe decline in effective rights protection. It further contends that the Court’s classification of revocation as an administrative rather than penal measure is misguided, since revocation reshapes the very conditions under which rights can be secured. A meaningful proportionality assessment must therefore attend to the “rights delta” between the citizenship revoked and the one to which the individual is relegated.