We are stepping up our campaign to call for the UK Government to abolish citizenship stripping, and we need your help. Add your name to our open letter to the Prime Minister today.
Dear Prime Minister,
Over the last fifteen years, the UK has become a world outlier in citizenship stripping. The use of this power is an affront to the British values of fairness and equality before the law. It damages the sense of belonging of British communities by making some people’s citizenship worth less than that of others. We urge you to take action to remove this power from UK law.
The UK is the only G20 nation to strip citizenship in bulk. Under these powers, around nine million people in the UK could be stripped of their citizenship at the whim of the Home Secretary. Three in five people of colour are vulnerable, compared to just one in twenty white people. [1]
Our citizenship stripping law is fundamentally racist – it discriminates between people based on their heritage. This creates a two-tier citizenship regime that is at odds with the foundational British principle of equality before the law. It tells Britons with a connection to another nationality, however remote, that their passport is worth less and their rights less secure than others.
This policy grants unchecked power to the Home Secretary, betrays our commitments to international law, and denies vulnerable British nationals the protections that British citizenship should guarantee. We urge you to abolish citizenship deprivation for the so-called ‘public good’ and restore the equal value of British citizenship for all.
[1] Stripped: The Citizenship Divide, Dec 2025, Reprieve and the Runnymede Trust, https://reprieve.org/uk/2025/12/11/stripped-the-citizenship-divide/.
