Source: https://asadakhan.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/supreme-court-eu-law-fails-vietnamese-jihadist/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 19:24:50+00:00

Document:
Pham v Secretary of State for the Home Department  UKSC 19 (25 March 2015) – read fully updated article on SSRN.
In the case of Pham (formerly “B2”), Lord Neuberger PSC, Lady Hale DPSC and Lord Mance, Lord Wilson, Lord Sumption, Lord Reed and Lord Carnwath JJSC unanimously dismissed the suspected terrorist’s appeal. The Supreme Court held that Pham was a Vietnamese national at the time the Home Secretary deprived him of his British citizenship. The key issue for the court was whether the British Nationality Act 1981 (“the 1981 Act”) prevented the Home Secretary from depriving Pham of British citizenship because making an order of that nature would cause him to become stateless. The answer depended on the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (“the 1954 Convention”) and whether the alleged Al Qaeda trainee was “a person who is not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law”. In the Supreme Court, Pham raised a new ground and argued that the deprivation decision was disproportionate and unlawful under EU law. However, the court did not find it necessary to resolve the dispute about EU law.
Born in Vietnam (Mongai) in 1983, Pham lived in Hong Kong with his parents prior to the family’s arrival in the UK in 1989. After claiming asylum they were granted indefinite leave to remain and later in 1995 they also acquired British citizenship. Pham and his parents never held Vietnamese passports and they never took any steps to renounce their Vietnamese nationality. In fact, the only document linking Pham to Vietnam is his birth certificate. He attended a college of design and communications in Kent and converted to Islam when he was 21 and it is contended that he subsequently descended into Islamic extremism and travelled to Yemen (December 2010 – July 2011).
The Security Services assessed that during Pham’s trip to Yemen, Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula trained him as a terrorist and he therefore became a threat to the safety and security of the UK. As Lord Carnwath observed, the assessment has not been judicially tested. Pursuant to section 40(2) of the 1981 Act, the Home Secretary decided to make an order depriving Pham of his British citizenship as this would be conducive to the public good. The Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC, see here) allowed Pham’s appeal because the decision made him stateless and was not permitted under section 40(4) of the 1981 Act.
Before Jackson, Lloyd Jones and Floyd LJJ,  EWCA Civ 616 (see here), the Home Secretary argued that the decision made Pham de facto stateless (with nationality but denied the protection which should go with it), but not de jure stateless (without nationality under the laws of any state) and therefore it did not make him stateless within the meaning of section 40(4) of the 1981 Act. It was also alternatively argued that this could not have occurred until some time after 22 December 2011, the date of notification and service of the deprivation order. Pham was also notified of the decision to deport him to Vietnam which refused to accept him as its citizen. The Court of Appeal unanimously held that the result of the order was to render Pham de facto stateless but not de jure stateless and the Home Secretary’s appeal succeeded on the first ground and the second ground did not therefore arise.
In the Administrative Court, Pham argued that if his Supreme Court appeal about his disputed citizenship succeeded it may have a significant effect on the application of his article 6 ECHR rights in the context of extradition proceedings. Aikens LJ and Simon J,  EWHC 4167 (Admin) described Pham as “a British resident” and dismissed his appeal; the court held at para 91 that in its “view whether the appellant is a British citizen or not makes no difference to his relevant article 6 rights.” According to the Supreme Court’s judgment, Pham’s extradition was due no later than 26 February 2015.
Key issues upon appeal to the Supreme Court involved the interpretation of the 1954 Convention and loss of Union citizenship. The court said that “stateless” in section 40(4) of the 1981 Act has the same meaning as article 1(1) of the 1954 Convention. The parties accepted this construction and Lord Carnwath observed at para 20 that the French and Spanish versions are equally authentic to the English text. Even relatively early on in his judgment at para 30 Lord Carnwath adopted an unsympathetic tone in relation to the accused terrorist’s case by letting it be known that citing the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in Kuric v Slovenia (2013) 56 EHRR 20 (relied on by the intervening Open Society Justice Initiative) threw no light on the issues because it was not concerned with statelessness within the meaning of the 1954 Convention.
38. … evidence of a decision made or practice adopted by the Vietnamese government, which treated the appellant as a non-national “by operation of its law”, even adopting the broadest view of those words as interpreted by the UNHCR; nor in any event of one which was effective at the date of the decision.
So in reality, on 22 December 2011, Pham had Vietnamese nationality whereas on learning that he would be deported, Vietnam declined to accept him. Lord Carnwath discerned that the problem with SIAC’s reasoning was flawed because a Vietnamese court could determine a status as at a particular date in the past, but that Vietnamese law did not point towards such a power being vested in the executive, nor did it purport “to make such a retrospective determination” in Pham’s case.
As regards EU law, Pham contended that his case also raised a question about whether the deprivation decision also deprived him of citizenship of the European Union and if so what, if any, role the principles of proportionality would play. The EU law point amplified the procedural advantages provided by ZZ (France)  QB 1136 (see here) that were unavailable under national law. For Pham, because no other state would recognise him as a national and he would be denied all the benefits of any citizenship anywhere, it was disproportionate to deprive him of EU citizenship and deny him his “right to rights”. Proportionality would also be offended because the same aim was achievable by “less onerous means” and the risk posed by Pham was manageable under the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act 2011.
The EU law point was not made before the Court of Appeal because it was considered that the decision in G1 (Sudan)  QB 1008 (Laws, Rix and Lewison LJJ) did not allow it to be raised. G1 was naturalised as a British citizen in 2000 (after arriving in the UK as a child and being granted indefinite leave to remain as the child of his refugee father). His participation in protests against Israeli atrocities in Gaza caused his arrest in 2009 but he preferred to skip bail and return to Sudan and, a fugitive from justice, remains there at large. His behaviour evoked the government’s wrath and he was deprived of his British citizenship.
Pham asserted European citizenship rights. In addition to the key case of Rottmann v Freistaat Bayern  ECR I-1449 numerous other authorities such as Kaur  All ER (EC) 250, McCarthy  All ER (EC) 729 Zambrano  ECR I-1177 and Dereci  ECR I-11315 were analysed and applied to his case. Pham and the Open Society Justice Initiative argued that if the Supreme Court was in any doubt on the application of EU law, it should refer the ambiguity to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).
Dr Rottman acquired German nationality by naturalisation and automatically lost his original Austrian nationality. He was born in Graz (Austria) and moved to Munich (Germany) in 1995 because he was suspected of serious fraud on an occupational basis in the exercise of his profession. (His move was a “cross-border” element.) In 1997, a warrant was issued against him in Austria and during the process of naturalising as a German citizen he did not disclose the criminal proceedings against him in Austria. Consequently, because of his deception, Rottman’s certificate of naturalisation was withdrawn by the Freistaat Bayern (Bavaria, Germany). The issue was whether the deprivation decision – not only depriving Rottman of German citizenship but also of European citizenship – meant that it had to be made in accordance with European principles, including that of proportionality.
In G1 (Sudan), Laws LJ at para 39 found EU citizenship to be “wholly parasitic” on citizenship of the member state(s). This was “surely problematic” and the court failed to see how the legislative machinery allocated “the grant or withdrawal of State citizenship to the competence of the Union or subject it to the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice.” Laws LJ did not construe Rottmann as conferring a “panoply of black-letter EU law” into the process of G1’s case. Rather, he held that the effectiveness of G1’s remedies needed to be judged with reference to the standards of the common law.
An additional point of competence under the EU Treaty intersected with the constitution, and identified its participants, because “[t]he conditions on which national citizenship is conferred, withheld or revoked are integral to the identity of the nation State.” Surely, in the absence of a cross-border element, it was wrong to give the CJEU the jurisdiction to judge any procedural conditions governing, conferring, withholding or revoking citizenship without first knowing whether Parliament (under the European Communities Act 1972 or elsewhere) had relinquished its role to the CJEU to modify the UK’s laws.
From that perspective, it was highly unlikely that EU law obtruded national law. In truth, Rottmann and the CJEU did not rule the UK, Laws LJ did and he did not accept that UK law allowed the CJEU as having jurisdiction to modify the mechanics of the 1981 Act.
Pham relied on Zambrano and Dereci to argue that the Treaty precluded national measures producing the effect of depriving citizens of the genuine enjoyment of the substance of the rights conferred by virtue of their status as Union citizens. But as demonstrated by Harrison (Jamaica)  EWCA Civ 1736, the idea was controversial and it sufficed to say that Laws LJ’s weighty questions in G1 (Sudan) remained unanswered.
59. … identify the respects in which a decision on these legal issues might be necessary for disposal of the case, including how the EU requirement of proportionality would differ in practice in the present case from proportionality under the European Convention on Human Rights, an issue already before SIAC, or from applying domestic law principles.
Accordingly, the scope of Pham’s appeal was limited and no EU law point was in play and the case was therefore confined to the narrow question of statelessness within the meaning of section 40 of the 1981 Act.
it is clearly very arguable that there are under the Treaties jurisdictional limits to European Union competence in relation to the grant or withdrawal by a Member State of national citizenship.
For Lord Mance, the national law of the member state concerned determined the question of whether an individual possesses the nationality of that state: the point was historical. Unless domestic law gave the CJEU unrestricted and unappealable power to decide and enlarge the scope of EU law, it was ultimately for the national court to assess consistency with its own domestic constitutional arrangements, including what jurisdictional limits exist on the competence of EU institutions. Adopting Professor Dr Lübbe-Wolff’s (of the Bundesverfassungsgericht) belief that proportionality is a “rationalising heuristic tool … directing attention to different aspects of what is implied in any rational assessment of the reasonableness of a restriction”, the eminent jurist ironed out the creases and held that context determines the appropriate intensity of review irrespective of whether the review is conducted under EU, ECHR or common law.
In light of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Bancoult (No 2)  UKHL 61 and Pomiechowski  UKSC 20, Lord Mance explained that depriving someone of British citizenship was a radical step on any view, especially where the person had no attachment to any other country. His Lordship concurred with Lord Carnwath and Lord Sumption that proportionality could in principle be an appropriate standard of review at common law for a decision removing a status as fundamental as citizenship.
Lord Sumption advanced an absorbing analysis from the viewpoint of CCSU  AC 374. Explaining that the decision in Pham’s case was “a single indivisible act”, he expressed reservations about applying the test of proportionality to the European citizenship component and not to British nationality. The deprivation decision affected Pham’s British and European citizenship and the alternative of regarding “European citizenship as a mere attribute of national citizenship” made Union citizenship wholly parasitic on national citizenship but contradicted the CJEU’s sweeping statements about treating European citizenship as “fundamental”.
In E. Fripp’s excellent The Law and Practice of Expulsion and Exclusion from the United Kingdom (2015), Lord Hope of Craighead KT explains that six decades ago the legal aspects of deportation, removal, exclusion and deprivation “were so simple that it would hardly have been contemplating devoting an entire book to them. How things have changed. The world has become larger and more volatile.” Apart from further exposing the tension between the UK courts and the CJEU in the field of citizenship, this judgment also demonstrates the more gruesome and constantly intensifying conflict between Islam and the West. Despite all the ills of the world and irrespective of politics, religion and ideology, it is quite sad that ungrateful people (B2, G1 and hundreds of others) who were granted asylum and given British passports by the UK should want to repay its generosity with terrorism.
Bitter facts such as these lay the foundation for section 66 of the Immigration Act 2014. As regards cases where the citizenship status results from the person’s naturalisation, section 66 inserts section 40(4A) into the 1981 Act and empowers the Home Secretary to deprive someone of British citizenship if she considers their conduct to be seriously prejudicial to the interests of the UK and there are reasonable grounds for believing that the person is able, under the law of a country or territory outside the UK, to become a national of such a country or territory.
… No book devoted to this area of the law can expect to survive for very long without being kept up to date. So I hope that this will be the first edition of many, as it earns for itself a permanent and welcome place on our bookshelves.
This entry was posted in Citizens Directive, Citizenship and Nationality, CJEU, Deportation, Immigration Act 2014, Politics, Proportionality, Statelessness and tagged Asylum, British Nationality, European Union, Terrorism, UK Supreme Court. Bookmark the permalink.
A British member of al-Qaeda has claimed he only agreed to carry out a suicide bombing at Heathrow as a way of escaping from a terror training camp in Yemen where he was suffering from scabies.
Minh Quang Pham, a British citizen born in Vietnam, spent six months in Yemen in 2011 training with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), one of the deadliest branches of the terror network.
He returned to Britain in July 2011 after allegedly being tasked by Anwar al-Awlaki to build a bomb and and ultimately blow himself up in the arrivals section of Heathrow airport.
The 33-year-old was arrested by British police and extradited to New York where he pleaded guilty in January to three terrorism charges.
Ahead of his sentencing Pham wrote his US judge a 13-page handwritten letter in which he said he was “very naive” when he joined the terror group and insisted he had no intention of actually carrying out the Heathrow attack.
Instead, he said he accepted the mission because it would let him leave Yemen and offer some relief from chronic scabies he was suffering at a desert training camp. “I only wanted to leave Yemen and had to accept a foreign operation,” he wrote.
The second to last section of his long letter is entitled “Scabies” and describes at length his discomfort in Yemen.
He tells how he was stopped by Bahraini security as he flew back to Britain and how airport authorities recoiled at the sight of his skin condition.
“The Bahraini authorities were horrified by the sight when they stripped me during my interrogation, the agents were afraid even to come near,” he wrote.
While in Yemen, Pham worked on Inspire, the al-Qaeda magazine which includes recipes for making explosives and was read by the Boston Bombers before their 2013 attack.
But he had a poor relationship with Samir Khan, the magazine’s Pakistani-American editor, who Pham said “scorned” him and his moderate beliefs.
Both Khan and al-Awlaki were killed by an American drone strike in September 2011 and Pham wrote that he would probably have been killed too if he had not left several months earlier.
Al-Awlaki gave Pham £6,000 to carry out the attack and personally instructed him on how to make a bomb from household chemicals, according to the FBI.
But the money was seized from him when he landed at Heathrow in July 2011 and it does not appear that Pham made any effort to actually make the bomb.
He was arrested nearly a year later at the request of the US and eventually extradited to New York in February 2015.
He was charged with five counts including providing material support to a terror group, receiving terrorist training, and possession of a machine gun as part of a violent crime. None of the charges directly relate to a plot to bomb Heathrow.
In his letter he renounces “all acts of terrorism and all extreme ideology”.
“Al-Qaeda’s action is damaging the image of Islam and I further do not believe they represent true Islamic values,” he wrote.
An Al-Qaeda leader personally trained a former McDon­ald’s worker from south London in bomb-making techniques and ordered him to carry out a suicide attack in the arrivals hall of Heathrow airport, US court papers reveal.
Anwar al-Awlaki gave almost £5,000 and a “clean” laptop to Minh Pham to plan the alleged atrocity, instruct­ing him to target passengers arriving from America and Israel.
The al-Qaeda chief, who was later killed by a US drone strike, told Pham, 33, to tape metal bolts around the bomb to cause maximum casualties.
WASHINGTON — The Qaeda bomb-making instructor carefully demonstrated for his student how to mix the chemicals to make a volatile powder, then supervised a test explosion and added a sinister final tip: tape bolts around the homemade bomb to produce lethal shrapnel.
The explosive expert’s identity, revealed by a Qaeda operative facing sentencing next week, came as a surprise: He was Anwar al-Awlaki, the American imam who had joined Al Qaeda in Yemen and become the terrorist network’s leading English-language propagandist.
Mr. Awlaki had long been known for public oratory on behalf of Al Qaeda before he was killed in a drone strike in 2011 on President Obama’s orders, making him the first American citizen killed without criminal charges or trial in the campaign against terrorism.
But new court filings in New York offer the most detailed account yet of a hidden side of Mr. Awlaki’s work inside Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen — as a hands-on trainer who taught recruits how to make bombs, gave them money for missions and offered suggestions about how to carry out suicide attacks.
The papers, part of a sentencing memorandum submitted by the government, were filed Tuesday in Federal District Court in Manhattan in the case of Mr. Awlaki’s former bomb-making student, Minh Quang Pham, a Vietnamese-British convert to Islam. He has pleaded guilty to three terrorism-related counts and is to be sentenced Monday.
In their papers, federal prosecutors suggested that 50 years would be an appropriate sentence for Mr. Pham, who is in his early 30s and traveled secretly to Yemen in 2010, where he swore allegiance to Al Qaeda’s affiliate there and worked on the group’s online propaganda publication, Inspire.
The court papers make it clear that Mr. Pham admired Mr. Awlaki. He “visibly teared up” when discussing Mr. Awlaki, and he repeatedly referred to Mr. Awlaki with the honorific title “sheikh,” prosecutors wrote.
The papers include detailed summaries of interviews of Mr. Pham by the F.B.I. after the British authorities sent him to the United States to face prosecution. In one interview, Mr. Pham recalled the day that Mr. Awlaki visited a safe house in Yemen where Mr. Pham was staying. Mr. Pham said meeting Mr. Awlaki gave him “an amazing feeling,” an F.B.I. memo says.
A separate court filing by Mr. Pham’s lawyer, Bobbi C. Sternheim, includes a 15-page handwritten letter from Mr. Pham to the judge, Alison J. Nathan. In the letter, Mr. Pham said Mr. Awlaki was the “highest-ranking” member of Al Qaeda in Yemen that he met there during his stay.
He also wrote that he had “made the right choice” by leaving the group in July 2011, noting that Mr. Awlaki and a younger American Qaeda member, Samir Khan, were both killed in the drone strike that September.
Since Mr. Awlaki’s death, some critics have suggested that the cleric should not have been killed because he was more ideologue than operative. In a 2013 speech, Mr. Obama countered that Mr. Awlaki had gone operational, pointing to his role in directing the so-called underwear bomber.
But before the government’s disclosure of Mr. Pham’s statements, which were first cited briefly in court before he pleaded guilty in January, there was little evidence that Mr. Awlaki had developed the expertise to take a direct role in building bombs or teaching others to do so.
A prolific lecturer and preacher who mixed fluent Arabic and English, first as a popular American imam and later as an online recruiter for Al Qaeda, Mr. Awlaki was viewed by some counterterrorism officials as even more dangerous than Osama bin Laden before both men were killed in 2011.
His huge online presence outlived him, and his influence has turned up in dozens of terrorism cases after his death, including the Boston Marathon bombing, the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris and the killing of 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in December.
Mr. Pham told F.B.I. agents in interviews last year that Mr. Awlaki himself conducted the bomb training in Yemen’s Marib Province.
Mr. Pham described Mr. Awlaki as the only Qaeda member he had met “who was qualified and capable of planning jihadist operations against the West because Aulaqi had lived in America,” one F.B.I. summary says.
Mr. Awlaki directed Mr. Pham to use “great caution” while in Yemen in his communications with outsiders. Mr. Pham drafted emails and saved them on a USB thumb drive, which he then gave to other Qaeda members who were tasked with sending the messages on Pham’s behalf, prosecutors said in their memo.
Later, when Mr. Pham prepared to leave Yemen, Mr. Awlaki gave him 6,000 British pounds, about $10,000 at the time, which he directed him to use to attack Heathrow Airport near London. Mr. Pham told investigators that Mr. Awlaki had told him to target crowds in the arrivals area for flights from the United States or Israel. Mr. Pham told agents he had changed his views and never tried to carry out the attack.
Mr. Awlaki also gave Mr. Pham a new “clean” laptop to take with him to Britain, “so that Pham would not have any issues if authorities searched his computer,” the government wrote.
Mr. Pham also gives the fullest description to date of Mr. Awlaki’s oversight of Inspire, a collection of jihadist ideology and practical instructions for carrying out terrorist attacks. Mr. Khan, the younger American member, would compile the articles and photographs for each issue, and Mr. Awlaki would “review and approve” them. Then the contents would be loaded onto a USB drive and given to a courier to be taken to a safe place for uploading to the Internet.

References: UKSC 
 EWCA 
 CJEU 
 CJEU 
 CJEU 
 CJEU 
 EWCA 
 CJEU 
 UKHL 
 UKSC 
 CJEU