Due to the UK government’s “extreme and secretive” power to revoke citizenship, nearly one million Muslim citizens are at risk of losing their British nationality, with the majority being of Bangladeshi, Indian, and Pakistani descent.

A recent report by the Runnymede Trust, a non-profit organization working on citizenship rights, and Reprieve, an international human rights law organization, warns that around 9 million people in the UK—about 13% of the population—could lose their citizenship under powers controlled by the Home Secretary.

The report highlights that this authority disproportionately affects citizens linked to South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and poses a systematic threat to Muslim communities in the UK.

Under current law, the government can revoke the citizenship of any British national if it believes they are eligible for another nationality—even if they have never lived in that country or applied for its citizenship. Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Somali, Nigerian, North African, and Middle Eastern origin citizens are among the most vulnerable groups.

The report also emphasizes that this system has created racial inequality in citizenship rights, with Muslims and other non-white citizens facing conditional citizenship, unlike white Britons. Maya Foa, an official at Reprieve, said, “Previous governments revoked citizenship for political gain, and the current government has only expanded these extreme powers.”

Shabana Begum of Runnymede Trust echoed these concerns, saying, “There is a cold stream of citizenship revocations under the Home Office, disproportionately affecting Muslim communities. Citizenship is a right, not a privilege. Yet successive UK governments have implemented a two-tier system, which sets a dangerous precedent.”

According to the report, three out of five non-white Britons are at risk of losing their citizenship, compared to only one in twenty white Britons. The most affected groups are citizens with heritage from India (984,000), Pakistan (679,000), and Bangladesh. Those whose citizenship has been revoked are overwhelmingly Muslims from South Asia, the Middle East, or North Africa.

The report notes that citizenship revocation was once reserved for wartime or exceptional circumstances. However, under anti-terror legislation over the past two decades, over 200 people—mostly Muslim—have had their citizenship revoked since 2010. In 2022, the government gained the power to revoke citizenship without notifying the individual.

A 2025 law now ensures that even if a court declares a citizenship revocation unlawful, the individual does not regain citizenship until the government’s appeal is concluded—a process that can take over a year.

Source: Middle East Eye