Sadakat Kadri is an associate tenant at Doughty Street Chambers.
The removal of citizenship has been used as a penalty for disloyalty only rarely in Britain. A handful of spies with dual nationality were denaturalised during the Cold War, but the last case in the 20th century was in 1973. Change came slowly even after 9/11: only five people were stripped of British citizenship by Labour home secretaries, and the emblematic bogeyman of the era, the...
Sri Lanka’s authorities are in buoyant mood. As Prince Charles prepares to open the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Colombo, the Defence Ministry is helping to organise celebrations. But it isn’t the queen they are honouring. The CHOGM is gathering to acknowledge the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, as chairman of the Commonwealth, a position he will occupy for...
I was quite pleased when my recent piece about Sri Lanka's chairmanship of the Commonwealth earned me a present. The pleasure evaporated quickly enough, however. My benefactor was a lobbying outfit called Engage Sri Lanka; the gift a 222-page polemic, Corrupted Journalism: Channel 4 and Sri Lanka. There is much about the book that is opaque, including the identity of its authors, but the purpose underlying its publication is transparent enough: to rubbish Channel 4 News for its coverage of Sri Lanka, in particular for two documentaries it has made about the final months of the long war against the Tamil Tigers.
In a case recently heard in the High Court the lead applicant, an Iraqi arrested by British forces based in Basra on 16 November 2006, offered a statement that was summarised as follows:
[The soldiers who arrested him] beat him severely, slammed him against a wall and forced him into a stress position in which they stood on his knees and back. His 11-month-old son’s arm was stamped on...
The whereabouts of Ibrahim Magag are causing concern. The 28-year-old hasn’t been seen at home since Boxing Day, and though that might ordinarily be the business of no one but his wife and kids, his absence has set off a police manhunt and exposed him to the risk of five years in jail. Magag isn’t a defendant awaiting trial or a convict due to be sentenced. His brush with the law has arisen because he is one of ten people on whom the home secretary, Theresa May, has served a notice under the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act 2011. Although it is impossible to be sure what the TPIM notice said – its contents are not a matter of public record – it seems to have asserted May's belief that Magag, who was born in Somalia, was linked to the extremist organisation al-Shabaab. That belief entitled her to impose restrictions on his liberty, including a curfew, and he is a fugitive only because of his apparent breach of those restrictions. In other words, Magag stands to be criminalised because the home secretary suspects him of criminality.
A modern criminal trial can be exceedingly inconvenient. The more fairly conducted it is, the less certain the outcome. The accuser can end up all but in the dock; the accused may walk away from...
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