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CITIZENSHIP

BENHABIB, Seyla: The Rights Of Others.Aliens, Residents, and Citizens

SPIRO, Peter J.: Beyond Citizenship. American Identity after Globalization, Oxford University

Press, 2008

Concept

The citizen is the individual who has membership rights to reside within a territory, who is

subject to the state's administrative jurisdiction, and who is also, ideally, a member of the

democratic sovereign in the name of whom laws are issued and administration is exercised.144

Acquisition

Naturalization

Length of stay, language competence, a certain proof of civic literacy, demonstration of

material resources, or marketable skills

Justification of rights

-I will assume that rights claimsare in general of the following sort: "I can justify to you with

good grounds that you and I should respect each others' reciprocal claims to act in certain ways

and not to act in others, and to enjoy certain resources and services."

-A concern of this kind was also behind Hannah Arendt's skepticism that one could successfully

justify "the right to have rights" ([1951] 1968, 298299). A postmetaphysical justification of

the principle of right would differ from Kant's in the following way: instead of asking what each

could will without self-contradiction to be a universal law for all, in discourse ethics we ask

which norms and normative institutional arrangements would be considered valid by all those

who would be affected if they were participants in special moral argumentations called

discourses. The emphasis now shifts from what each can will via a thought-experiment to be

valid for all, to those justificatory processes through which you and I in dialogue, and with good

reasons, can convince each other of the validity of certain norms by which I mean simply

"general rules of action.131-2

Basic rights are a necessary condition for the existence of discourses My question is whether a postmetaphysical justification of rights discourse is possible. The brief

answer is that: "If I am able to justify to you why it is right that you and I should act in certain

ways, then I must respect your capacity to agree or disagree with me on the basis of reasons

which equally apply to us both. But to respect your capacity for communicative freedom to

accept or reject on the basis of reasons means to respect your capacity for personal

autonomy. Human rights, or basic rights, then, are the norms that would undergird and enable

the exercise of your personal autonomy." 132-3

Tension of moral universal with the civil-juridicalThe discourse of liberal democracies is necessarily caught in this tension created by the

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context- and community-transcending the rights of others validity dimension of human rights

on the one hand, and the historically formed, culturally generated, and socially shaped

specificities of existing juridico-civil communities on the other. The point is not to deny this

tension by embracing only one or another of these moral alternatives but to negotiate their

interdependence, by resituating or reiterating the universal in concrete contexts. If we identify

the moral universal with the juridico-civil, we end up with more or less benign forms of

communitarianism or ethical relativism; if we ignore the juridico-political and the permissible

range of variations in different systems and traditions (what I referred to above as the schedule

of rights), we dismiss the political in the name of the moral. 133-4

-Right to be a citizen

The language of Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations

1948) reads: "No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to

change his nationality." This permits sovereign states some latitude in determining what would

be "nonarbitrary" denaturalization.

NEWS CONCERNING UK

In total the Coalition government has stripped the nationalityof 37 dual nationals in the past

three years using powers in the British Nationality Act. Under the previous Labour government

the powers were used five times in seven years.

Two of those who lost their citizenship, London-born Mohamed Sakr and his childhood friend

Bilal al Berjawi, went on to die in drone strikes, and a further man, Mahdi Hashi, was the

subject of rendition to the US, where he was held in secretfor over a month and now faces

terror charges.

Last year 20 people lost their citizenship between January and November. A Foreign Office

sourcetold the Bureauthe rise was due to efforts to prevent fighters returning from Syria.

-Theamendmentwould significantly expand her citizenship-stripping powers. The amendment

removes the ban on making people stateless, as long as the person affected has been

naturalised so it will not apply to British-born people.The concern is that this is all part of the wider excesses of the US-led war on terror: once

someone has been rendered stateless, it becomes much easier to subject them to execution-by-

drone, without the inconvenience of legal consequences.

-The new amendment will allow May to make an individual stateless if they have done

something seriously prejudicial to the UKs interests. The clause states that the law will have a

retroactivefunction: May will be able to look at the manner in which a person conducted him

or herself from before the law was passed in order to decide whether to remove their

citizenship.

And where cases are on national-security grounds as in almost every case the Bureau has

identified the state can use secret evidence, so that the person affected may never learn

more than the most basic details about the allegations against them.

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/02/27/former-british-citizens-killed-by-drone-strikes-after-passports-revoked/http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/02/27/former-british-citizens-killed-by-drone-strikes-after-passports-revoked/http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/12/22/missing-british-somali-man-reappears-in-new-york-court/http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/12/22/missing-british-somali-man-reappears-in-new-york-court/http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/12/23/rise-in-citizenship-stripping-as-government-cracks-down-on-uk-fighters-in-syria/http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/12/23/rise-in-citizenship-stripping-as-government-cracks-down-on-uk-fighters-in-syria/http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/12/23/rise-in-citizenship-stripping-as-government-cracks-down-on-uk-fighters-in-syria/http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/2013-2014/0128/amend/pbc1282801a.1609-1615.htmlhttp://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/2013-2014/0128/amend/pbc1282801a.1609-1615.htmlhttp://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/2013-2014/0128/amend/pbc1282801a.1609-1615.htmlhttp://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/2013-2014/0128/amend/pbc1282801a.1609-1615.htmlhttp://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/12/23/rise-in-citizenship-stripping-as-government-cracks-down-on-uk-fighters-in-syria/http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/12/22/missing-british-somali-man-reappears-in-new-york-court/http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/02/27/former-british-citizens-killed-by-drone-strikes-after-passports-revoked/

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-Britain is a signatory to a UN treaty on prevention of statelessnessbut the new amendment

appears to have been drafted so as not to breach this treaty. Under this treaty the British

government has reserved the right to make an exception if someone has done something

seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the state. This is thephrasing that has been added

to the amendment to the Immigration Bill. This is a tougher test than the one that is applied to

dual nationals, where May must judge that someones presence in the UK is not conducive to

the public good, but she does not have to prove they have done anything harmful, or have her

decision tested by a court of law in advance.

Liberal thinking on migration

Of course this manner of presenting the problem is refracted through the highly individualistic

premises of social contract theory: the reasons for migration are rarely simply personal or

idiosyncratic. In the majority of cases, the root causes of migration are poverty, famine, and

persecution on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, language, gender, and sexual preference, as

well as ethnocide, genocide, civil wars, earthquakes, pestilence, and the like. These events

create refugees and asylees as well as migrants. Clearly, first-admission conditions for

immigrants are of a different sort from those for refugees and asylum seekers. States have

more discretion to stipulate conditions of entry in the case of immigration than they do when

facing refugees and asylees. Their obligations to the latter groups are moral and, for those

states who are signatories to the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees (United Nations

1951) and its 1967 Protocol they are legal.

- Right to citizenship and the communicative freedom

"If you and I enter into a moral dialogue with one another, and I am a member of a state of

which you are seeking membership and you are not, then I must be able to show you with good

grounds, with grounds that would be acceptable to each of us equally, why you can never join

our association and become one of us. These must be grounds that you would accept if you

were in my situation and I were in yours. Our reasons must be reciprocally acceptable; they

must apply to each of us equally."137

-What would be objectionable from a moral point of view is the absence of any procedureor

possibilityfor foreigners and resident aliens to become citizens at all; that is, if naturalizationwere not permitted at all, or if it were restricted on the basis of religious, ethnic, racial, and

sexual preference grounds, this would violate the human right to membership.

-Disaggregation of citizenship

The unitary model, which combined continuous residency upon a given territory with a shared

national identity, the enjoyment of political rights, and subjection to a common administrative

jurisdiction, is coming apart. One can have one set of rights but not another: one can have

political rights without being a national, as is the case for EU nationals; more commonly,

though, one has social rights and benefits, by virtue of being a foreign worker, without eithersharing in the same collective identity or having the privileges of political membership.

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-Citizens of EUstates can settle anywhere in the union, take up jobs in their chosen countries,

and vote as well as stand for office in local elections and in elections for the Parliament of

Europe.8 They have the right to enjoy consular and diplomatic representation in the territory of

a third country in which the member state whose nationals they are may not be represented.

They have the right to petition the European Parliament and to apply to the European

Ombudsman.

-What table 4.1 and table 4.2 also reveal is the extent to which refugees and asylum seekers

are still denied the "right to have rights" in the full sense. While their life, liberty, and any

property which they may have are protected by Article 6 of the European Convention on

Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, their rights of movement, employment, and

association are heavily curtailed. They are completely dependent upon the will of the sovereign

state which grants them temporary sojourn. The transitory nature of their stay is accentuated

even more by restrictions on their employment capacities. Often confined to segregated

housing blocks in rural and urban centers, frequently cut off from the community around them,

and denied the right to seek employment, refugees and asylum seekers become easy targets

for xenophobic outbursts and sentiments. Nation-states retain them in a state of "exception"

(Schmitt [1927] 1996, 4749). They cannot appeal the decisions concerning their status and

may raise no claims against deportation orders. 162-3

-In December 2011, the so-called Single Permit Directivewas adopted. It creates a set of rights

for non-EU workers legally residing in an EU State. Furthermore, the Long-Term Residence

Directivehas created a single status for non-EU nationals who have been lawfully resident in

an EU country for at least five years, thus establishing a legal basis for equal treatment in all EU

countries.

These developments also suggest a dialectic of rights and identities: commonly, the individual

who is the subject of rights is assumed to have some kind of fixed identity which precedes the

entitlement to the right in question, but what is frequently neglected is that the exercise of

rights themselves and the practice of political agency can change these identities. Political

identities are endogenous and not exogenous to processes of democratic iteration and theformation of rights. 168-9