“Citizenship is an unrestricted, unrevokable, irreversible right and status, or it is nothing“ so what about brexit
Executive summary
The statement that “citizenship is an unrestricted, unrevokable, irreversible right” collides with practical law: domestic states can and do revoke or restrict national passports and citizenship in specific circumstances, and Brexit demonstrates that supranational citizenship (EU citizenship) can be lost when a member state exits the union, subject to negotiated protections for individuals [1] [2] [3]. The real question is not philosophical purity but which legal regimes govern which rights and how political choices—like Brexit—translate into concrete gains and losses for people [4] [5].
1. The domestic reality: British citizenship can be constrained and in limited cases revoked
United Kingdom domestic law gives the Home Secretary powers to deprive people of British citizenship, principally as a national security measure, and to withdraw passports without removing citizenship itself, subject to procedural safeguards and some statutory limits such as the prohibition on depriving someone born British who has no other nationality [1] [6]. In practice the last two decades have seen a revived use of those powers, and recent legislation and bills reflect political pressure to tighten revocation and appeal procedures [7] [6].
2. EU citizenship: a layered, dependent status that Brexit made extinguishable
EU citizenship is legally derivative of membership in an EU Member State, not an independent, untouchable status; when the UK left the Union its nationals lost EU citizenship rights, a change the European institutions and courts have treated as inevitable unless special arrangements are made [2] [4] [5]. The Withdrawal Agreement protects certain residence and social rights for people who were already resident, but it does not preserve EU citizenship itself [3] [4].
3. Courts and scholars disagree on the normative fixity of EU citizenship
The Court of Justice of the European Union has affirmed that UK nationals cannot automatically retain EU citizenship after Brexit—a definitive legal position that limits political argumentation—while academic commentary has argued that revoking EU citizenship raises questions of retroactivity, discrimination and proportionality that could merit further legal challenge [8] [9] [10]. That tension exposes the gap between juridical doctrine and moral claims that citizenship must be absolute.
4. Practical protections exist but they are contingent on politics and treaties
Where people had exercised rights before Brexit, the Withdrawal Agreement and domestic measures (like the EU Settlement Scheme) were used to preserve residence and related rights, but those protections are statutory or treaty-based rather than a metaphysical restoration of EU citizenship; they can be imperfect and politically contested, as parliamentary committees and litigants have documented [3] [11]. The administrative reality—who gets settled status, who is deportable—depends on policy design and enforcement choices [12].
5. The sovereign impulse: why Brexit proponents promoted revocation as sovereignty reclaimed
Brexit supporters framed freedom from EU constraints as a restoration of national sovereignty—part of which includes the power to control who has which rights on the national territory—and that rhetoric has shaped tougher immigration and citizenship measures post-Brexit [12] [13]. Hidden agendas include domestic political leverage: citizenship and migration policies are potent signals to voters and can drive legislation that expands government powers to revoke or restrict rights [6] [14].
6. Two practical takeaways from the Brexit example
First, citizenship is not a single legal or political object: British citizenship and EU citizenship operate under different legal orders, so a claim that “citizenship is inviolable” cannot be generalized without specifying which regime and what legal guarantees are in force [1] [5]. Second, legal protections—courts, treaties, and appeal mechanisms—matter: the Withdrawal Agreement, domestic appeal routes, and CJEU rulings determined the distribution of loss and protection after Brexit, showing how law tempers politics but does not make rights metaphysically irreversible [3] [8].
7. Conclusion: citizenship as contested legal status, not metaphysical right
Brexit illustrates that citizenship can be both a durable status and a contingent legal entitlement: rights flow from institutional membership and political choice, and while robust safeguards reduce arbitrariness, they do not make citizenship immune to revocation or erosion—especially where different legal orders intersect or a state exercises sovereignty to alter membership rules [10] [6]. Assertions that citizenship must be “unrevokable or nothing” are normative positions that the Brexit record tests but does not unambiguously validate.