You’re Not One of Us: Britain’s Problem with Returning Foreign Terrorist Fighters OM A R HU SSE I N
Enshrined in Article 15 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is ‘the right to a nationality’ and protection from being ‘arbitrarily deprived’ of one’s nationality (UN General Assembly 1948). However, the UDHR has always been an aspirational document, not because it is not legally binding (indeed, many of its principles have been formalised in international treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) but because, as Hannah Arendt believed, ‘human rights have never been universal’ (Boucher 2011: 223). History is littered with debates regarding who qualifies as truly human and, consequently, is entitled to human rights. Arendt held the stance that one’s membership in humanity and their claim to possessing human rights is uniquely contingent on their status as a citizen of a political community. Hence, citizenship represents the ‘right to have rights’ (Arendt cited in Boucher 2011: 222). By including an individual in a moral community which stems from the political collective (Dossa 1980: 319), citizenship enters one into the plurality of humanity, thus protecting their rights from desecration. Without the status of citizenship, so to speak, one is only human in the most basic sense: ‘nothing more than a savage’ (Boucher 2011: 222). Arguably, the deprivation of citizenship designates an individual as external to the political framework which dictates the humane treatment of its members. Arendt argued that the Nuremburg Laws ‘systematically transformed [Jews] from political beings into natural creatures without any legal claims’ and this created the prerequisite conditions for the Holocaust to take place in isolation from ‘moral law and justice’ (Dossa 1980: 320). Whilst Arendt’s emphasis on citizenship as a condition to claiming the possession of human rights is problematic in its implication that those who
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