Citizenship was a right. Is it now a privilege?

Ideas53:59Citizenship: A Right or a Privilege?

In September 2014, Jack Letts called his parents with a shocking update: he was in Syria. He told them he'd gone to see how he could help in the "protests against Assad," according to his mother.

A few short months prior, Sally Lane and her husband, John, had said goodbye to their son so he could further his study of Islam and Arabic. They paid for his ticket to go first to Jordan to visit a friend, and then on to Kuwait to take his courses.

That September phone call kicked off an almost-decade-long fight to get Letts out of Syria — a fight that still has no resolution.

'Securitization of immigration'

Letts was born and raised in Britain. When it became clear that he was in Syria, the British government ultimately stripped his citizenship in 2019. But because he's a dual British-Canadian citizen, Letts retains the right to return to Canada. Lane says the British Foreign Office told her, "there was no point in speaking to them anymore. I should speak to the Canadians."

Letts is part of a group of 23 Canadians whose request to come back to Canada from detention in Syria brings up a key question: what does the Canadian government owe its citizens? Critics have argued that citizenship rights that were once strong and robust have weakened significantly. 

"I think the place to start with this is really post-9/11 when we first saw, what I'll call, the securitization of immigration," said Audrey Macklin, a professor of law at the University of Toronto. She says the framing of immigration as a potential threat to national security of the nation has always been present but that it really "came to the fore" in those early years. 

There was an accompanying narrative shift: citizenship is not a right — it's a privilege.

Nisha Kapoor, who teaches sociology at the University of Warwick in the UK, says "it was quite a shift" from how citizenship was ordinarily understood in liberal democratic countries.

"One of the things that's happened through the war on terror is the normalization of the idea that citizenship is a more precarious institution and should be dependent on the behaviour of individuals." 

Macklin says citizenship feels like a privilege in the sense that people often feel proud to belong to a country and feel lucky to have the advantages that come with being a citizen. But she added there's another understanding of privilege that makes citizenship more vulnerable.

"In law, a privilege is something that belongs to the sovereign, not to you as the individual. And it's something that can be granted, withheld, offered, and taken away, in some sense, almost arbitrarily."

Macklin says this understanding of privilege in a legal sense — that citizenship is something that belongs to the state and not the individual — is "a really dangerous idea." And it results in making everybody vulnerable to being stripped of their fundamental and basic entitlements as a citizen.

"It's important to say this manipulation or this instrumentalization of this cliche 'citizenship is a privilege, not a right' was used almost paradoxically, to make citizenship weaker by turning it from something that I hold, and it can't be taken away from me, a strong right, into something that is fragile and revocable and liable to being stripped away by the state."

Stripping citizenship

Canada, like many other countries after 9/11, stepped up the use of immigration laws to pursue non-citizens it deemed a threat. But it also weakened the institution of citizenship itself by changing citizens into non-citizens.

In 2014, the government passed a law to strip citizenship from individuals who were deemed a threat to national security, thus paving the way to removing them from Canada. 

The citizenship revocation law in Canada was itself repealed in 2017 making Canada part of a small minority of countries bucking the trend of expanding state powers to denationalize their citizens. But some argue the spirit of that law lingers on.

Asiya Hirji is a Toronto lawyer and represents a group of Canadian children and their non-Canadian mothers in Kurdish detention camps.

"I think the example of what's happening in northeast Syria shows that in some ways these sanctions are still actually being applied, but silently and subtly." She says that while for the government revocation is no longer possible, repudiation is still an option. And citizens can retain their citizenship but they effectively lose their citizenship rights.

A warning to others

Six years later, Jack Letts is still in a Kurdish prison in northeast Syria. 

In January 2023, a federal court ordered the government to repatriate 23 Canadians — four men, including Letts, six women, and 13 children. The government agreed to bring the women and children but is appealing the order to return the men. So far, four women and 10 children have returned with some of the women being subject to peace bonds. 

Letts' mother, Sally Lane, says she could never have predicted her son would be in this position and thinks it should serve as a warning to others.

"I think people need to think that this could happen to them, that their loved one could be abroad and denied their rights, banished, with no chance of clearing their name." 

Lane says her son's decision to go to Syria was impetuous and that he's spent years "trying to row back from a very, very stupid mistake."

Letts' family and lawyers have not seen any evidence against him. Lane says there have never even been any official allegations.

"I think the only way that Jack will ever get a fair hearing is if he is repatriated and whatever evidence the government thinks that they have against him can be brought out in the open." 

Guests in this episode: 

Sally Lane is the mother of Jack Letts who is currently in prison in northeast Syria.

Audrey Macklin is a professor of law, Chair of Human Rights, and the director of the Center for Criminology and Socio Legal Studies at the University of Toronto.

Nisha Kapoor is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Warwick.

Asiya Hirji is a lawyer with Downtown Legal Services and represents two non-Canadian mothers and their Canadian children currently detained in northeast Syria.
 

*This episode was produced by Naheed Mustafa.