How Britain’s efforts to launder inequality in citizen rights contributed to a forgotten UNGA declaration

Abstract

This article presents results from new research into United Nations (UN) documents from 1972 to 1985, demonstrating that UK efforts to launder inequality in citizen rights drove the proposal, drafting, and adoption of the 1985 UN General Assembly Declaration on the Human Rights of Individuals who are not Nationals of the Country in which they live (DHRN). The DHRN process began in 1972, as part of a UK response to Idi Amin’s Expulsion of Ugandan Asians, and was adopted without vote in 1985. Today’s six hierarchical categories of UK nationality emerged from efforts over this period to restrict entry to the United Kingdom of some UK citizens, on racial grounds. This article presents an example of how successive UK governments both used citizenship as a tool of international positioning and used international politics to launder inequality in citizen rights.

Introduction

Contemporary British citizenship categories have been made and remade partly to restrict, on the basis of race, the access of colonial and former colonial subjects to the territory of the United Kingdom, and partly to position the United Kingdom internationally. One important and yet largely forgotten example of this is the United Kingdom’s role in the proposal, framing, and eventual adoption without vote of the 1985 United Nations (UN) General Assembly Declaration on the Human Rights of Individuals who are not Nationals of the Country in which they Live (DHRN). The story of the DHRN, as I present it in this article, began in 1972, when a UK representative to the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (hereafter ‘the Sub-Commission’) unsuccessfully proposed that the UN’s Commission for Human Rights send a ‘telegram of remonstrance’ to the Ugandan Government, concerning Idi Amin’s decree expelling Asian Ugandans without citizenship. Most of those expelled had been entitled to Ugandan citizenship by the 1962 Constitution, in virtue of being born in Uganda to parents also born in Uganda, but had been either blocked from or stripped of it. The 1967 revised Constitution further enforced this. The majority were also British Protected Persons (BPPs) or Citizens of the UK and Colonies (CUKCs) without a ‘qualifying connection’ to the United Kingdom who, since the 1960s, were not permitted to enter the United Kingdom.

Today, the DHRN is largely forgotten. While scholarship on the United Kingdom’s response to Amin’s Expulsion Order mentions the United Kingdom’s overtures to international organisations and particularly to the UNHCR to discuss ‘burden-sharing’ (Cosemans, 2022; Williams, 2015), it overlooks this aspect of the United Kingdom’s UN-level diplomacy, and so also its implications. Indeed, one scholar writes that Britain abandoned the idea of bringing the Expulsion Order to the attention of the Sub-Commission (Uche, 2017: 831–832). However, my analysis of UN documents from the period 1972–1985 demonstrates that the United Kingdom did bring this to the Sub-Commission, through its new UN representative, Diana Elles. I also show that this led to a 13-year process and, eventually, to a new General Assembly declaration. The limited scholarship on Elles’ role presents her as pursuing human rights for persons without citizenship (Hathaway, 2005). I argue that it is necessary also to analyse her work in the context of Britain’s efforts to limit commitments to some of its own citizens overseas.

Citizenship scholars wrote about the DHRN contemporaneously (Bosniak, 1991; Goodwin-Gill, 1989; Henckaerts, 1995; Plender, 1988), but soon stopped. In the late 1990s, one scholar observed that ‘since [it was adopted] the declaration has not often been referred to’ (Flinterman, 1997: 57). It is mentioned once in the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ 2006 report into The Rights of Non-citizens (OHCHR, 2006: 16). It is only mentioned in a footnote in Ryszard Cholewinski’s important 2010 review paper, ‘Human Rights of Migrants: The Dawn of a New Era?’ (Cholewinski, 2010: n.4) and David Weissbrodt’s classic 2009 book, The Human Rights of Non-Citizens doesn’t even mention it in passing (Weissbrodt, 2009). ¹ I have not found any reference to it published since the 2010s. In this article, I show why this Declaration needs to be considered. The story of the DHRN demonstrates that British citizenship policy must be considered in international context. It shows that the role of race in the politics of British citizenship affects and is affected by Britain’s domestic and international politics. Finally, it shows how these interests, followed by inertia in the General Assembly, produced a declaration that no one really wanted.

Scholarship of British Politics has been accused of ignoring the question of race (Akram, 2024), and while there is important work in this area (e.g. Fryer, 1984; Gilroy, 2002; Hall, 2021; Olusoga, 2021; Paul, 1997; Perry, 2015; Solomos, 1989), these scholars also emphasise that the complex functions of race in British politics are still often overlooked or downplayed. Given today’s hierarchy in UK citizenship categories is rooted in measures to restrict citizenship rights by race (Bhambra, 2017; Hampshire, 2005; Nasar, 2020; Prabhat, 2020; Webber, 2022), the politics (including the international politics) of citizenship must also be affected by this. Studying the history of the DHRN makes clear the central relevance of race, of Empire, and of the still unfinished process of decolonisation in understanding British politics, including its framing of citizenship as a tool in Britain’s strategy of global engagement. It demonstrates how the study of British Politics can benefit from greater engagement in International Relations, and adds nuance to the study of International Relations.

In this article, I offer the first serious scholarly engagement with the DHRN since the period of its adoption. I present the results of new research, over the summer of 2023, into documents from the period 1972–1985 held at the UN Depository Library at the Bodleian Law Library. I also used notes and documents on the DHRN provided online by the UN Audiovisual Library of International Law. ² Tracing the DHRN through its proposal, drafting, negotiation, and adoption led me consult five key collections of documents for this period. ³ First, I looked for reference to the Telegram of Remonstrance in documents from the Sub-Commission. I then examined every document in the collection from that date onward. I was looking for any mention of the rights of non-nationals, non-citizens, or the ‘Ugandan Asian crisis’. When the documents indicated that the matter had been referred to another level, I picked up the trail in the documents of the Commission on Human Rights, and then of Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). I took pencil notes of key points and photocopied pages which I judged to be of particular importance. Second, I found the Declaration, by its date of adoption, in the documents of the General Assembly, and then worked backward to trace where it had come from, also examining every document for any reference to the matter. I also worked through the documents of the Third Committee for this period. By working both forward and then backward, I hoped to make it less likely to miss anything. This also made it possible to study the policy context within which the DHRN was emerging. ⁴ To establish the intellectual context, I sought out contemporaneous scholarship. Once I had identified the importance of Diana Elles, I also traced her writings and speeches, including the records in Hansard of her contributions in the House of Lords.

This article begins by presenting the context of the 1972 Expulsion Order of Ugandan Asians, explaining the politico-legal relationship that this population had with both Uganda and the United Kingdom. It then shows how the United Kingdom’s Edward Heath Conservative Government responded to the Order, and particularly, the proposal that the UN send a ‘telegram of remonstrance’. When this didn’t work, I show how the strategy shifted, leading eventually to the drafting of a declaration on the human rights of people without citizenship, then without nationality. While the process that produced the DHRN began in the 1970s as an initiative driven by a Conservative Peer as UK representative, it evolved. By the end of the 1970s, that individual’s, and the United Kingdom’s, interests had shifted, but the DHRN had already been elevated to consideration by the General Assembly. The result was a peculiar UNGA declaration, the DHRN, which was adopted without vote and which, I suggest, no one wanted.

Ugandan Asians’ status with respect to Uganda until the Expulsion Order

On paper, the conditions for citizenship set out in the 1962 Constitution of the newly independent Uganda seem inclusive. In practice, scholars show that things were more complicated (Alava et al., 2020; Mutibwa, 1992). It was particularly difficult for Asian Ugandans to obtain citizenship (Kotecha, 1975). The Constitution stated that a person must prove that they had a parent born in the country (Chapter II Section 12). Given birth registration had only been rigorously implemented in the region since 1947 (Martin, 1953: 238), for most Ugandan adults in the early 1960s, it would be difficult to prove they had a parent born there. It has been observed that Black Ugandans were rarely asked to demonstrate their parentage (Kotecha, 1975, but note exclusions detailed in Alava et al. (2020) and in Mutibwa (1992)), that a significant portion of White Ugandans left at Independence (Manby, 2009: 50–51), and so that this requirement fell particularly hard on the Asian population (Kotecha, 1975; Mamdani, 2011; Sharma and Wooldridge, 1974). The 1967 Constitution meant that those who had not yet obtained citizenship would struggle to do so (Chapter II Section 4).

Uganda had been a Protectorate of the British Empire since the late 19th century (Park, 2022; Trivedi, 1971). There had long been trade across the Indian Ocean between East Africa and parts of Asia and the Middle East, with evidence of traders as early as 1300 and of growing ivory trade in the 16th century (e.g. Hansen, 2023). British rule introduced new industries. It also facilitated the arrival of indentured labourers to contribute to building East Africa’s railway network, and courted people to set up small businesses, or work as clerks, soldiers, and policemen in the colonial administration (Cosemans, 2022: 211; Hansen, 1999: 814; Mamdani, 1975). These factors combined to motivate significant migration from Asia in the early 20th century. As Asian communities became established, they also faced discrimination. Some commentators used the phrase ‘Jews of Africa’ to refer disparagingly to Asian people in East Africa (Theroux, 1997: 70; Hamai, 2011; Hansen, 1999: 814 n.21).

As elsewhere, in East Africa Britain instituted a race-based hierarchy with Black people at the bottom, White people at the top and everyone else in between (Adima, 2022; Gupta, 1968). In East Africa, then, Asian communities ‘formed a middle layer’ and for the most part settled in cities, while Black East Africans were still to a large extent engaged in agriculture (Cosemans, 2018; Jamal, 1976). While Kampala of the 1960s is described by some as an unusually diverse cultural centre for the intellectual elite (Adima, 2022; Mamdani, 2011), Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (1999), who left Uganda for Britain mere months before the Expulsion Order, recalls that life in Uganda was largely segregated. Before Independence, there were already recorded anti-Asian incidents of violence and actions like the 1959 boycott of Asian goods in Buganda (Tandon, 1972). Ugandan Asians were increasingly targeted as the most tangible symbols of British rule (Hansen, 1999). This continued after Independence as Ugandan Asians were perceived to contribute to structures of dependence (Shaw, 1973). Meanwhile, the new Ugandan political system was managing the complexity of ethnic and political identities produced by its arbitrarily drawn external borders (Hansen, 2013).

When Uganda gained Independence in 1962, the Government of Milton Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress implemented measures to increase Black business-ownership and economic control (Cosemans, 2022; Taylor, 2013). There was change, but it was slow, and frustrations grew. Obote’s Government adopted explicitly anti-Asian policies and allowed growing anti-Asian violence to develop. Across the border in Kenya, anti-Asian policies were also escalating. From the late 1960s, Asian Kenyans began leaving in greater numbers. Obote claimed that Ugandan Asians ‘behaved British’ (Cosemans, 2022). He described the United Kingdom’s 1962 and 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Acts (which introduced requirements that some British citizens apply for a voucher to enter the United Kingdom, explained below) as turning Uganda into a ‘refugee camp’ for people waiting to get off the voucher list (Cosemans, 2022: 222).

It was against this backdrop that in 1971 General Idi Amin staged a coup, coming to power in Uganda with the support of the army and, some claimed, Britain (Mamdani, 1993: 94; Uche, 2017: 819). Thanks to Obote, there was already a significant population of Ugandan Asians without citizenship. Amin ordered that counts be made of the number of Asian people in the country (Patel, 1972; Sharma and Wooldridge, 1974). He warned the public about what he referred to as ‘Asian business malpractices’ (Parson, 1973: 67; Patel, 1972). Like Obote, Amin described Ugandan Asians as the responsibility of the British Government (Uche, 2017). He blamed Uganda’s ills on the Asian population, who he framed as vestiges of British rule. In August 1972 he issued the race-based Expulsion Order, giving all Ugandan Asians 90 days to leave, then amending this to expel only persons without citizenship (Wooldridge and Sharmer, 1974: 9; Uche, 2017). In the wake of this Order, it is reported that many Ugandan Asians who had managed to obtain citizenship were accused of having done so fraudulently and their citizenship was removed (Kotecha, 1975). ⁵

Ugandan Asians’ status with respect to the United Kingdom until the Expulsion Order

The 1960s had also seen an unpicking of the UK citizen rights of Ugandan Asians. As sociologist Christian Joppke has put it: ‘the peculiarity of British immigration policy is that it is directed not against aliens, but against formal co-nationals’ (Joppke, 1999: 100). The 1960s and 1970s was a period during which the United Kingdom saw itself as detaching from what one politician at the time called, dismissively, the ‘detritus of empire’ (Hansen, 1999: 810, citing memo by P Cosgrave for E Heath 1970 referring to Kenyan Asians) and turning towards new partners in Europe. This began with the 1962 removal of entry rights from citizens with passports issued outside the United Kingdom. It continued through the 1968 removal of entry rights from citizens without a ‘qualifying connection’. It then involved the 1971 creation of the thinly veiled racial categories of ‘patrial’ and ‘non-patrial’, leaving non-patrial citizens without the right to enter their country of citizenship (e.g. Juss, 2007). Under the new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, the 1981 British Nationality Act created the status of ‘British Citizen’ and ended that of ‘Citizen of the UK and Colonies’. This tied membership explicitly to the United Kingdom, as a separate political unit, and not to a relationship with an Empire or its legacy (Juss, 2007; Karatani, 2019; Shah, 2001). It also created new categories of overseas citizens with limited rights (e.g. Mark, 2020).

The 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act had provided British Subjecthood to everyone in the British Empire and the 1948 British Nationality Act introduced the new status of Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies (CUKCs), defining all CUKCs, BPPs, and citizens of Commonwealth countries, as British Subjects. People in those Commonwealth countries without their own rules for citizenship allocation became ‘British subjects without citizenship’. The 1948 Act set out six categories of nationality which resemble today’s six categories. CUKCs could live anywhere in the Empire, and a war-torn Britain ambivalently accepted help from its colonies to rebuild, but Westminster policy-makers assumed most would stay in their colonial territories (Hansen, 2023; Prabhat, 2018: 10). There were the active efforts to recruit healthcare and transport workers in the Caribbean; and the ship, Empire Windrush, famously arrived in Britain from Jamaica in 1948 with around 500 people, most intending to work, and many of whom were ex-service persons (Olusoga, 2021; Wambu, 2023). There was meanwhile a growing fear among some in the United Kingdom of potentially substantial (non-White) immigration from across the Empire causing irreversible social problems (Wallace Goodman and Pepinsky, 2021: 424). This led to growing violence on British streets and 1958, for example, saw notorious race riots in Notting Hill in London. This was contemporaneous with the anti-Asian violence unfolding in colonial Uganda mentioned above. Faced by decades of growing racism in East Africa and the squeeze of citizenship reforms from the United Kingdom, it is reported that after Independence many East African Asian families strategically maintained a range of citizenships (e.g. Mehta, 2001).

The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act passed by Harold Macmillan’s Conservative Government introduced a new distinction among CUKCs based on the ‘issuing authority’ of their passport, such that British passports ‘issued under a colony’s authority were subject to control’ (Hansen, 1999; Nayak, 1971). People subject to control would need to apply for a ‘work voucher’ to travel to the United Kingdom. This did not function as planned. After Kenyan Independence in 1963, difficulties obtaining Kenyan citizenship meant many Asian Kenyans retained CUKC whether they wanted to or not. However, as the Colonial Governor had become the High Commissioner at Independence, Kenyan CUKC passports were issued in Britain rather than Kenya. Consequently, while Kenyan BPPs would need to apply for vouchers, many CUKCs reportedly would not (Hansen, 1999: 827–828). In 1967, First President Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya African National Union Government passed a law requiring anyone without Kenyan citizenship to acquire a work permit. In response, many Kenyan Asians began to leave for the United Kingdom (one report estimates 400–500 persons per week, Nayak, 1971; Theroux, 1997). January and February of 1968 saw the arrival of an estimated 12,000 Kenyan Asians in the United Kingdom (Cosemans, 2022: 220).

Panicked, on 22 February 1968, the UK Labour Cabinet under Harold Wilson agreed to create new legislation immediately (Hansen, 1999). The announcement soon reached Kenya, and by noon that day, all flights from Nairobi to London were fully booked well into March (Hansen, 1999: 820). Then 27 February saw the second reading of a new Bill requiring a CUKC must both hold a passport issued by London or a UK High Commission (as per the 1962 Act) and have a ‘qualifying connection’ to the United Kingdom through birth, naturalisation or adoption in order to enter the United Kingdom (Hansen, 2023: 367). Others could still apply for vouchers. This drew language from the 1964 British Nationality Act which allowed White people who had become citizens of Uganda or Kenya to regain their CUKC; the 1968 Act used the same criteria to remove citizen rights from Asian people who hadn’t become citizens anywhere else (Juss, 2007). The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act was passed by the UK Parliament on 1st March (Hansen, 1999: 820–821). Unusually, this new law immediately entered into force, and that day, ‘the fully booked aeroplanes that had been carrying Asians to the United Kingdom for months were turned away’ (Hansen, 1999: 810). The immediate aim was to block entry of Kenyan Asians, but it was also intended to block the estimated 370,000 non-White British subjects in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Malaysia, Singapore, and Fiji who had documents tying them to the United Kingdom and to nowhere else (Cosemans, 2022: 220; Natarajan, 2023: 338). It would effectively make a vast swathe of British nationals stateless (Shah, 2001).

Britain tried to frame these populations as more properly citizens of India, but India pushed back. Since its independence in 1948, Indian citizenship law was also affected by the receding British Empire. Scholars broadly identify three dimensions to India’s response to East African Asians. First, diaspora citizenship policy was affected by caste and class, and by ‘afterlives of indenture’ (Natarajan, 2023: 322). Second, was the idea that Ugandan Asians should ‘identify themselves with East Africa’; that dual citizenship would make diaspora Indians more vulnerable (Naujoks, 2015: 22; Oonk, 2015: 72–73). Third, there was concern not to impede diplomatic relations between India and East African Governments (Gupta, 1974: 317). The 1955 Indian Citizenship Act restricted dual citizenship and so access to passports, and in the 1960s, few people outside India were citizens (Cosemans, 2022: 216; Natarajan, 2023: 343; Oonk, 2015: 72). Eventually, Britain and India agreed on a messy solution such that India would accept the entry of East African Asians with British passports so long as the British Government would ‘endorse’ their passports as suitable for future entry to the United Kingdom (Cosemans, 2022: 222; Nayak, 1971). But the United Kingdom was already setting its sights away from the Commonwealth and towards Europe. It was in this light that the United Kingdom’s 1971 Immigration Act emerged.

Drafted and adopted under new Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath, historian Callum Williams (2015) argues convincingly that the 1971 Act was driven by three main factors. First, it hoped to address growing xenophobia within the United Kingdom. In 1968, Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s notorious and inflammatory speech had warned that increased non-White immigration would cause ‘rivers of blood’ (Powell, 2010). His views had gained traction among voters and the 1971 Act set out to ‘blunt the challenge of Enoch Powell’ (Williams, 2015: 510). Second, it was intended to support the United Kingdom’s negotiations for accession to the European Economic Community (EEC). That is, it would restrict immigration without giving the EEC reason to doubt the United Kingdom’s enthusiasm to participate eventually in EEC free movement. After two unsuccessful applications (in 1961 and 1967), Heath was keen to be the PM to bring the United Kingdom into Europe. Third, the 1971 Act should not adversely affect the United Kingdom’s relationship with the ‘Old Commonwealth’: with the White-majority countries of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (Williams, 2015: 513, 523).

The Bill initially focused on removing entry rights from CUKCs, thus limiting the number of people eligible to participate in any future free movement agreement with the EEC (Evans, 1972), while making way for a new special relationship with EEC citizens who would in time have greater rights in the United Kingdom than its own non-patrial citizens (De Smith, 1972; Evans, 1972). However, the United Kingdom faced another problem: to enter the EEC it would need to give priority to EEC Member States in trade agreements. This, with the proposed changes to CUKC citizen rights, led to push-back from the Old Commonwealth (Williams, 2015). New Zealand feared severe effects of losing priority access to UK markets for its dairy and meat exports (in 1960, butter comprised 16% of New Zealand’s total exports and 92% of New Zealand’s exports went to Britain; Singleton and Robertson, 1997: 329). Meanwhile, Australia was concerned that the huge numbers of its citizens who were first or second generation immigrants from the United Kingdom, would lose access to the United Kingdom (Williams, 2015). The idea of the ‘patrial’ emerged as a masterstroke. A ‘patrial’ was defined as someone who had been settled in the United Kingdom for 5 years or else had been born within the Commonwealth with a parent or grandparent born within the ‘United Kingdom and the Islands’ (see 1(1) and 2(6) of the Act). ⁶ Patrial citizens would have the right of abode; non-patrial citizens would not. The onus was on individuals to prove patriality (De Smith, 1972; Hartley, 1976). This provided a way to restrict the right of abode to (predominantly non-White) CUKCs of the New Commonwealth, while maintaining it for (predominantly White) CUKCs of the Old Commonwealth, without explicit racial distinctions. It could appease followers of Powell, EEC allies, and the Old Commonwealth in one swoop (Williams, 2015).

Things were on track for the 1971 Act to come into force in 1973. But then in 1972 Idi Amin issued the Expulsion Order. While many Ugandans were BPPs, a sizable number of the Ugandan Asians were CUKCs (Hansen, 2023: 367). Vanishingly few of them, however, would have a ‘qualifying connection’ to the United Kingdom or be patrials. The United Kingdom would eventually have to admit around 28,000 of its citizens fleeing the Order, but it did not do this willingly (El-Enany, 2020; Hansen, 2023). As mentioned above, one under-examined dimension of the United Kingdom’s response to the Expulsion Order (and of its efforts to avoid obligations to admit its own citizens affected by such policies in the future) was the decision to propose that the UN send a ‘telegram of remonstrance’.

The United Kingdom proposes a ‘telegram of remonstrance’

In this section, on the basis of research into UN documents, I present the first stage in a long-forgotten aspect of Britain’s response to the Expulsion Order. This is not yet the Declaration in the title of this article, but an initial step on the road to it. First, though, in a private reaction to Amin’s announcement, Edward Heath:

accepted that we could not disclaim responsibility for British passport holders. But we must seek to ensure that world opinion was fully seized of the problem if a mass movement of population in a state of panic was to be avoided [. . .] and a suitable resolution by the United Nations might be helpful. (Quoted in Cosemans (2022: 226))

That is, the United Kingdom would need simultaneously to limit the number of expellees able to enter the United Kingdom, and to manage the international framing of the incident. A crucial step in this was to redefine the expellees as refugees rather than UK citizens in public discourse, including global public discourse.

Once the Ugandan Asians were politically defined as refugees, it was possible for the United Kingdom to approach organisations like UNHCR to seek burden-sharing (Cosemans, 2022; El-Enany, 2020; Williams, 2015). This formed the content of a speech given by then British Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home at the UN General Assembly. He reportedly initially asked the GA ‘to put the question of the Ungandan [sic.] Asians on its agenda’, but then withdrew this request (Wooldridge and Sharma, 1974: 15). Scholar Chibuike Uche (2017) writes that Britain considered raising the Expulsion Order at the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (‘the Sub-Commission’), but abandoned this idea. Uche (2017: 831–832) reports that the United Kingdom’s UN Department noted that none of the instruments protecting the rights of minorities forbade explicitly discrimination against those without citizenship. But the documents of this Sub-Commission make clear that the United Kingdom did not in fact abandon the idea: far from it.

Rather, a new UK representative, and new member of the Sub-Commission, proposed a response. She was not an elected representative nor an official already involved in UN-level diplomacy. Instead, Diana Elles, who had served as a code breaker in World War Two and was now a London barrister and Chairman of the British section of the European Union of Women, entered this arena (Elles, 1971; Saunders, 2018: 197). Only months before the Expulsion Order, in May 1972, Conservative PM Edward Heath had given Elles a lifelong peerage, making her a Baroness and giving her a seat in the House of Lords (Telegraph, 2009). ⁷ Elles then joined the British delegation to the UN, and then the Sub-Commission. It was in this role, in 1972, that Elles proposed that the UN should send ‘a telegram of remonstrance to Kampala’ against the Expulsion Order (Report on 25th Session E/CN4/Sub2/332 at 22).

Elles’ proposal was defeated 14:1 with six abstentions. One contemporary scholar observed that the rejection of this proposal (Plender, 1988: 476):

. . . cannot be construed as an endorsement of the legality of the expulsion. Members of the sub-committee [sic.] were unwilling to support an initiative originating in an ex-colonial power and criticising a former dependency on racial grounds.

The United Kingdom was also framing the situation purely in terms of Ugandan persecution of a non-citizen population. This failed to acknowledge both that many of those affected should have been entitled to Ugandan citizenship and that many had some form of citizen relationship with the United Kingdom. The proposed telegram did more, then, than criticise Uganda’s policy on racial grounds. It also ignored the context of decolonisation within which it took place. In so-doing, it also ignored the United Kingdom’s own denial of core citizen rights to the significant proportion of the affected population entitled to them. In fact, rather than merely people without citizenship of Uganda, this was a population, many of whom were ostensibly entitled to citizenship of both Uganda and the United Kingdom, and yet able to use neither of them. They were effectively stateless.

Diana Elles’ report: From rejected telegram of remonstrance to UNGA declaration

Rather than allowing the premise behind the telegram proposal to fizzle out, Elles used the same language to argue that the Sub-Commission should consider the ‘applicability of present provisions for international legal protection of the human rights of individuals who are not citizens in the country where they live and consider which measures would be desirable’ (Resolution 8 (XXV) of the Sub-Commission of 30 August 1972; Resolution 1790 (LIV)). The Sub-Commission agreed. The Secretary General committed to prepare a survey of international instruments on 16 August 1973 (E/CN.4/Sub.2/335 16 August 1973) and on 21 August 1974, the Sub-Commission asked Elles to prepare a Study, which she submitted for comment in 1977. In 1980, a revised version of the Study, with a draft declaration as an appendix, was sent by the ECOSOC to the General Assembly for its consideration. One of the few brief discussions in scholarly literature of Elles’ role notes that her ‘efforts were [. . .] premised on the need to establish legally enforceable rights for aliens’ (Hathaway, 2005: 148). As I show, this is not the full picture: Elles also used the Study to establish the UK government framing of the situation for Ugandan Asians and of its relationship with its nationals overseas.

For Elles, Britain had obligations to CUKCs across the Commonwealth, but for her these obligations did not include settlement and were entwined with animosity towards the newly Independent Governments under which those CUKCs were now living. This is apparent from her interventions in the House of Lords. For example, in August 1975, Elles described Member States of the Organisation for African Unity as not ‘civilised’ (HL Deb 05 Aug 1975 vol 363 cc1455-7). She argued that to protect the status quo from OAU Member States, Western democracies should have a weighted vote in the GA (HL Deb 05 Aug 1975 vol 363 cc1455-7). As shown below, she also seemed to think that the United Kingdom should have a special role in international politics. That her views were not shared by other members of the Sub-Commission is evidenced, for example, by the rejection of the telegram of remonstrance proposal.

While some in the Lords made statements indicating that they were ‘not accepting the justice of the policy denying admission to the United Kingdom to our own passport holders’ (HL Deb 10 Feb 1975 vol 356 cc1067-70), this was not Elles’ position. For her, the differential treatment was fine. It is just that the United Kingdom also had obligations to citizens it prevented from entry, particularly given ‘the process of Africanisation which is going on in East African countries’ (HL Deb 10 Feb 1975 vol 356 cc1067-70). She explained,:

Since we accept responsibility for United Kingdom passport holders coming into this country, what measures are the Government taking to protect those who have to remain there? No doubt the Government are aware of the considerable discrimination against Asians in East African countries, particularly in regard to housing and employment. (HL Deb 10 Feb 1975 vol 356 cc1067-70)

She seemed to frame this not as obligation to provide citizen rights, but with the idea ‘that Britain had a ‘natural’ right to intervene in Africa’ (Harrison, 2012), echoing colonial tropes that subjugated peoples, lacking rationality, needed the benevolent intervention of British colonial authority (Galpin, 2024; Puwar, 2004). As I will show below, rather than acknowledging any UK culpability, she blamed what she saw as a misplaced ‘right of self-determination’ among newly independent States and those seeking independence.

While Elles pushed for the United Kingdom to accede to all human rights agreements, others in Westminster acknowledged dissonance. For example, Labour Peer Goronwy Goronwy-Roberts, who in 1975 became the Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, explained that he supported a hierarchy of British citizenship, including removing the right of abode from many, but that this made it impossible to accede in full to some human rights treaties (HL Deb 06 May 1976 vol 370 cc697-720). He said, ‘so long as the UK exercises immigration control with regard to some categories of UK passport holders’ it cannot ratify parts of the European Convention on Human Rights (HL Deb 06 May 1976 vol 370 cc697-720). For Goronwy-Roberts, this was evidence that there could be no singular understanding of human rights. Diana Elles had become interested in the rights of people without citizenship because of a desire to continue to prevent entry from some of its citizens, including those with no other citizenship. Elles (on behalf of the United Kingdom) used the Study she produced for the Sub-Commission to try to demonstrate her belief that the United Kingdom could do this without contravening either the Statelessness Conventions or the new suite of Human Rights Treaties.

During this period, the United Kingdom was coming under legal pressure regarding East African Asians it had denied entry. Even before the Expulsion Order, a case of 25 Kenyan Asians had been brought to the European Commission (Plender, 1971: 22; Wooldridge and Sharma, 1974):

[t]he applicants, being citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies or British protected persons, and holders of United Kingdom passports, were refused admission to the United Kingdom, although, as the British authorities were aware, they would not have been allowed to return to the country which they had left and there was no other country in the world which they were entitled to enter.

The suggestion was that refusing a person admission to the country of their passport was ‘degrading treatment’. A later case, brought to the UK Court of Appeal, is that of Pravinlal Thakrar, a BPP who, forced to leave Uganda in 1972, was refused entry to the United Kingdom (Akehurst, 1975; Marston, 1974). In 1974, the Court upheld his exclusion, arguing that while ‘a citizen expelled from a foreign country had a right to return to his country of nationality, which had a duty to receive him’, this did not apply for Thakrar, since he could go to India (Marston, 1974: 187–188). There was no evidence that he had any political or legal relationship with India. Lord Denning, a Judge in the case, observed of the Ugandan Asians: ‘[t]hey have never lived here. They live thousands of miles away in countries which have no connection with England except that they were once British protectorates’ (Akehurst, 1975: 74). However, the European Court of Human Rights found that the UK government had acted unlawfully in preventing entry of Kenyan Asians with British passports (East African Asians v UK (4403/70 [1973] ECtHR 2 (14 December 1973))).

The Study that Elles produced should, I suggest, be seen as a tool in UK efforts to rehabilitate its actions regarding Ugandan Asians, while ensuring it could avoid admitting its nationals fleeing under similar circumstances in the future. The Study with its appendices comes to 75 pages. Here I focus on three parts: (1) definitional work in the introduction, (2) sections on statelessness and on national minorities, and (3) a section on the human right to a nationality.

First, the Study takes for granted States’ definitions of people as ‘aliens’ and as ‘not citizens’, presuming people are without citizenship because they are migrants (E/CN.4/Sub.2/392/Rev.1 on p.iii). This is not unusual in UN documents, but given the case of Ugandan Asians which initiated this process, it is particularly problematic not to acknowledge, first, that a State might deny citizenship, including to people with legal entitlement; and second, that people might, as a result, be without citizenship where they were born. The presumption of migrancy is reiterated as follows:

[c]ategories of persons residing outside their country of nationality have been the Subject of separate instruments, although no single instrument has been adopted to give universal protections to the rights of aliens as such. (E/CN.4/Sub.2/392/Rev.1 p.15)

The statement itself is true, but it does not address the case of Ugandan Asians who were denied rights by both of the States from which they had claim to nationality (the United Kingdom and Uganda), including while present within one of them (Uganda). The Study had the potential to initiate a powerful Declaration, but this was not its intention. There was little appetite among most Member States, including the United Kingdom, to enumerate rights for people without citizenship, and particularly for those from which they had withheld citizenship.

Second, Elles, given the United Kingdom was an early signatory of the 1954 and 1961 Statelessness Conventions, seemed keen to emphasise that hollowing out citizenship did not constitute making people stateless. The Study includes a section on statelessness, listing ways in which people become stateless:

expulsion, persecution, deprivation by operation of law (including on marriage), acquisition of a territory by a foreign State or by municipal legislation on the declaration of independence by States exercising their right to self-determination, or failure to fulfil the necessary administrative procedures required by the State of nationality. (E/CN.4/Sub.2/392/Rev.1 p.20)

This does not include citizenships that are limited or stripped by changes in law. However, its emphasis on ‘States exercising their right to self-determination’ is reiterated in a later section on ‘National Minorities’. The Study explains: ‘[t]he development of the right to self-determination creates new minority problems’ (E/CN.4/Sub.2/392/Rev.1 p.25). That is, Elles presents the ‘right to self-determination’ as a major and problematic contributing factor to the creation of ‘minority problems’.

The Study’s unorthodox way framing of ‘national minorities’ is helpful for understanding how the United Kingdom saw its relationship with Ugandan Asians. Minority rights have been important in the international system since its creation (Jackson Preece, 1997). The notion of ‘national minorities’ that came from the League of Nations, specifically providing an arena to seek protections for groups without any other recourse, persisted (Kelly, 1973; De Nova, 1965; Valentine, 2004). This use of ‘national minority’ is found in the 1950 European Convention for Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (Van Houten and Wolff, 2008). When Elles was writing, then, there was a common usage of ‘national minorities’, referring to ‘persons belonging to a State’s population but distinguished from its majority on account of their group peculiarities such as ethnic traits, religious creed, language, and culture’ (De Nova, 1965: 276). They were specifically groups who were part of the population of a State but in contrast to ‘foreigners’, these were ‘those persons who are not claimed as citizens by other states’ (De Nova, 1965: 276).

However, in the Study produced by Elles:

‘national minority’ will be taken to mean: ‘persons who belong to a group owing allegiance on account of nationality to a State other than the one in which they are residing and who are numerically less than the other inhabitants of the State of residence. (E/CN.4/Sub.2/392/Rev.1 p.25, emphasis added)

And if the reader was in any doubt as to who should be included, a footnote is provided to elaborate on the problems of self-determination:

See the position of the Asian minorities in East Africa described in: Ben Whitaker, ed., The Fourth World: Victims of Group Oppression (New York, Schocken, 1979), pp.37-71. (E/CN.4/Sub.2/392/Rev.1 p.25, n.64)

That is, the Ugandan Asians were framed as a minority who properly owed allegiance elsewhere. As shown earlier, through her comments to the House of Lords, Elles acknowledged their citizen relationship with the United Kingdom, though this did not include a right of entry. The indication is that if there had not been self-determination in East Africa (and so loss of UK colonies), the matter of relocation to the United Kingdom would not have been raised, so that it is the self-determination that is to be blamed for the crisis. She is indicating that, as she sees it, these persons should, then, be considered insofar as they were not citizens of Uganda, rather than insofar as they were citizens of the United Kingdom.

Third, the Study includes a section on the right to nationality:

The specific right of nationality of the host State is granted to anyone born in the territory of the State, in the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (art.I(1)). Compliance with complicated provisions relating to registration and other procedural formalities is required for successful applications under the Convention. (E/CN.4/Sub.2/392/Rev.1 p.37)

This is a statement of the commitment under the 1961 Statelessness Convention. The reason this Convention is here is explained by the footnote provided for it:

The United Kingdom, having signed the Convention in 1961, felt bound to make provision for the retention of British nationality to Ugandan Asians who had not become Ugandan nationals. See Sharma and Wooldridge, ‘Some legal questions arising from the expulsion of the Ugandan Asians’, I.C.L.Q., vol. 23, part 2 (1974)’. (E/CN.4/Sub.2/392/Rev.1 p.37 n.91)

That is, it is used to argue that the United Kingdom surpassed its obligations vis-à-vis Ugandan Asians. In reality, the United Kingdom sought to avoid admitting them. While some entered the United Kingdom, many others, including those whose only papers connected them to the United Kingdom, fled elsewhere as refugees to Canada, India, New Zealand, Malawi and Kenya (El-Enany, 2020), with the support of UNHCR and ICMC. The inclusion of this footnote supports the idea that this Study was intended to launder the United Kingdom’s position while avoiding the risk of precedent set by the settlement of those Ugandans who had entered the United Kingdom.

Elles used this Study, then, to establish the United Kingdom’s framing of its involvement with and response to the Expulsion of Ugandan Asians. This shows tenacity. The process which had been initiated in 1972 with an unsuccessful proposal to send a telegram had now taken 8 years and resulted in a draft declaration that was on the cusp of being sent to the General Assembly. However, at this point Elles’ involvement, and so leadership of the United Kingdom in the process, fell away. In 1979, Elles was elected to fill a Conservative seat for Thames Valley in the first sitting of the European Parliament, her first elected position. She turned her focus towards Europe, publishing a series of book reviews to set out her belief in the need for a united Europe (Elles, 1980; Elles 1982; Elles, 1992). She resigned her UN office and did not mention the telegram, the Study, or the DHRN in the work she published thereafter (see also Elles, 1987), ⁸ instead focusing on the need for equal treatment among European citizens (Elles, 1992). From 1982, Elles served as Vice President of the European Parliament. ⁹ While Elles was focusing on Europe, her legacy in the UN was still unfolding, as the draft declaration was considered by the General Assembly.

Negotiating and then adopting an incoherent declaration

In May 1980, with Elles out of the picture, her Study, with the draft declaration included in an appendix, was submitted to the 35th Session of the General Assembly (ECOSOC Resolution 1980/29; E/CN.4/Sub.2/392/Rev.1). This officially marked its entry onto the path to becoming a declaration. Once the draft entered the GA, a Working Group was set up, made up of representatives of Member States with expressed interest, to negotiate the wording. They reported to the 35th Session of the GA, but with no agreement on any part of the document. A second Working Group was set up, to report to the 36th Session, then a third, and so on. After years of negotiations within General Assembly Working Groups, with the document getting increasingly convoluted and no nearer to consensus, it would have been clear that more negotiation wouldn’t help. At this point, though, the Declaration had momentum. As in Newtonian physics, once a body is moving, it takes more force to stop it or to change its course than to let it continue: dropping the DHRN at this point would have been more difficult than allowing it to play out. The resulting document is unclear in both language and rationale. It looks like a human rights agreement but neither identifies new rights nor systematises existing rights. On 13 December 1985, at the 40th Session, the DHRN was adopted without vote.

First, the language of the DHRN is unclear. This is already apparent in the title. While the first draft had referred to ‘citizens’ in the title and then moved between ‘citizen’ and ‘national’ in the text, during negotiations it became apparent that Member states had different understandings of these terms. Once the declaration had been referred to the General Assembly, the UN Law Commission was called in to help to address these terminological challenges. The report it produced acknowledged the absence of a shared terminological understanding among States. However, rather than offering a working definition, the advice of the Law Commission was to bypass the differences by introducing the word ‘alien’ to refer to the individuals included within the scope of the document (A/C3/35/WG2/CRP1, 6). Consequently, in the final version of the text, the word ‘citizen’ does not appear; it is replaced with ‘national’, which is undefined. ¹⁰ The title refers to ‘individuals who are not nationals’, and Article 1 offers a definition of ‘alien’ with respect only to ‘national’:

For the purposes of this Declaration, the term ‘alien’ shall apply, with due regard to qualifications made in subsequent articles, to any individual who is not a national of the State in which he or she is present.

This leaves it to each State to interpret the key terminology. As observed by the Government of Rwanda regarding a draft from 1980, in the absence of such definitions, some parts of the text are ‘somewhat vague and imprecise’ (E/CN4/1354/Add5, 3-4, submitted by State on 23 January 1980). It wasn’t only key terminology that was left undefined; confusing language was used throughout.

Second, during the drafting and in the final text, the underlying logic was unclear. I demonstrate this through studying State interventions both before and after the draft entered the GA. In their interventions, States seemed to exhibit four main approaches. A first approach assumes that the human rights of those identified as aliens are the same as the human rights of nationals, but that aliens’ human rights are often denied. However, in response to a 1979 draft, the Government of the German Democratic Republic, for example, warned that: ‘. . . the present draft declaration contains less than the minimum standards set by the provisions of international legal documents already in force’ (E/CN4/1354/Add2, 4, submitted by State 19 December 1979). A second approach assumes that the human rights of aliens are substantively different to those of nationals, so that it is necessary to produce a separate enumeration of aliens’ rights. A third and related approach was to frame interventions not in terms of human rights but rather in terms of the goods that States would be willing to offer to aliens and the conditions under which they would be willing to offer them. These second and third approaches are both inconsistent with an idea of human rights as universal. A fourth approach seemed to presume that the human rights of aliens are the same as the human rights of nationals, but introduced exceptions. There were, then, four main ways in which States understood the rationale for the declaration they were drafting.

Meanwhile, a number of States argued that the declaration was simply redundant. The Government of the USSR and aligned Governments argued that if States were already upholding existing treaties, then they would already be guaranteeing the human rights of aliens. For example, the Government of the USSR stated that: ‘. . . observance by all States of the provisions of these international instruments would make it unnecessary to prepare a special document in the form of a declaration in this field’ (E/CN4/1354/Add1, 11, submitted by State on 28 November 1979). As such, they argued that rather than wasting time on elaborating a new declaration, it would be more efficient to pursue greater buy-in and implementation of existing agreements. The Government of Austria went further, ¹¹ raising the concern that creating such a declaration risks ‘creating two classes of human beings’ (E/CN4/1354, 3, submitted by State 12 October 1979). It went on to explain: ‘Austria considers that in matters concerning fundamental and human rights aliens should in principle enjoy the same status as do a country’s nationals’. This wide discrepancy in approach to the declaration meant that a significant number of vocal States were opposed to the negotiation of the declaration from its early stages, while those who were committed intervened in often irreconcilable ways.

The negotiations stopped, I suggest, not because consensus was reached, but because it was clear that consensus could not be reached. At this point, there were three options: (1) set up yet another Working Group, (2) abandon the Declaration, or (3) adopt the Declaration without vote. Successive Working Groups had come no nearer to consensus. It would take more impetus to abandon the Declaration than to let it continue. In 1985, the DHRN was adopted without vote. The resulting text is incoherent and would please no one. Although the title suggests a focus on human rights, the first three substantive Articles (2, 3, and 4) do not refer to human rights, but emphasise constraints on, and duties of, the people whose human rights are ostensibly the Declaration’s focus. The only absolute rights stated in the text are the right not to be tortured (in Article 6) and a right not to be arbitrarily deprived of lawfully acquired assets (in Article 9). While Articles 5 and 8 enumerate lists of rights, many of which are already in core human rights treaties, they also introduce exceptions and constraints. Article 7 states that it allows expulsion, but with conditions. There is, in this Article, a prohibition on individual or collective expulsion of ‘such could aliens on grounds of race, color, religion, culture, descent or national or ethnic origin’ (emphasis added), where ‘such’ aliens refers to those who are ‘lawfully’ present in the State. At the time scholars raised the concern that this suggests, for example, that an ‘illegal alien’ be expelled because of their ethnicity or their religion (Henckaerts, 1995: 27).

Article 5 is the longest in DHRN. It divides its list of rights into two categories. First, there are those allocated only ‘in accordance with domestic law’. Second, there are those subject to:

such restrictions as are prescribed by law and which are necessary in a democratic society to protect national security, public safety, public order, public health or morals or the rights and freedoms of others.

This broad caveat allows quite substantial and unrestricted exclusions. The claim that a minority group is of concern for one of the reasons given in this Article could be used to justify both exclusion from citizenship and expulsion. As shown above, Idi Amin made such claims about Ugandan Asians. Article 8 enumerates complex sets of rights which it then makes available only to ‘[a]liens lawfully residing in the territory of a State’ and adds the further constraint that these rights are ‘subject to their obligations under article 4’. This suggests that these basic rights are not universal, as stated in the UDHR, for example, but rather privileges to be earned in the case of those without nationality.

There was not, then, consensus regarding the declaration’s intentions, the meanings of its key terminology, or of the rights that should be enumerated. While some States were interested in the human rights of aliens, this was not the central focus overall. The discussions relating to this process also affected other processes that were taking place concurrently. Consider, for example, the 1979 ‘Study of the Individual’s Duties to the community and the limitations on the Human Rights and Freedoms Under Article 29 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (E/CN4/Sub2/432 9 July 1979), which emphasised the ‘duties of aliens’ and referenced work relating to the DHRN, including Elles’ Study. During the period that the Sub-Commission was considering the DHRN, it was also debating how to respond to Apartheid in South Africa, for example, as well as race-based laws in Rhodesia. The process towards this Declaration became a key forum within which the human rights of those without citizenship or nationality, or without access to the rights thereof, had to be discussed, and the way in which this topic was framed. However, given the context that had initiated this process, it is surprising that the question of race-based exclusion from citizenship or nationality, or from citizenship rights, was not discussed. The nature of the negotiations blocked effective and productive discussion of human rights for people insofar as they lacked nationality or citizenship or interrogation into why they may be in this situation. Today, although this declaration itself is forgotten, the role it has played in steering the framing of the rights of those without nationality or citizenship persists.

By the time the DHRN entered the General Assembly, Diana Elles was no longer involved. The Study and initial drafting had served its purpose in reframing the United Kingdom’s response to the Expulsion Order in Uganda, and more generally the United Kingdom’s race-based removal of citizen rights, including removing citizen rights from people whose only citizen relationship was with the United Kingdom. Since the impetus for the DHRN had been the United Kingdom’s attempt to reframe its obligations to CUKCs, rather than to develop an agreement on the rights of people without citizenship or nationality more generally, the DHRN process had never had a clear direction. Once the United Kingdom’s purpose for it had been served, the DHRN process meandered even more significantly. However, it had already affected how the rights of persons without citizenship and nationality might be framed in the UN, how ethnic minorities could be characterised, and how the statelessness conventions could be overridden.

Conclusion

The story of the DHRN, then, provides insight into three important aspects of contemporary British nationality and citizenship. First, it shows how the making and remaking of British nationality and citizenship have emerged from the still ongoing dusk of Empire. Today’s six categories of British nationality, and hierarchies among citizens, have been created in order to restrict, on racial grounds, who would be able to enter the territory of the United Kingdom. Second, British citizenship and the British politics of citizenship are not merely domestic matters. Instead, they are intertwined with successive British Governments’ geopolitical strategies. Third, using the UNGA to launder domestic policies has had implications for how discussion of the rights of those without citizenship could be framed at the global level.

From July 1968 to May 1972, the political scientist Jack D Parsons (1973: 59 n.1) had been ‘conducting a sample survey of African and Asian businessmen in Kampala’. In 1973, 1 year after the Expulsion Order, he published an article with the title ‘Africanizing Trade In Uganda: The Final Solution’. In this article, he lamented the human tragedy wrought by the Expulsion: ‘That this has been traumatic and a never healing psychic scar is obvious, and regrettable. In purely human terms the expulsion is a tragedy’ (Parsons, 1973: 71). Given the title and this excerpt, Parsons seems to be linking the experience of Ugandan Asians with the ‘Final Solution’ for the Jews of Nazi Germany only a few decades earlier, which motivated global efforts to limit what could be done to minoritised populations. The parallels are present: Ugandan Asians were persecuted on the basis of race, blocked from or stripped of citizenship, and then this citizenlessness was used to remove them from the national demography. However, Parsons then continues: ‘In ideal abstract terms this solution may be rejected, but if it results in something called development in Uganda it may be an acceptable if not an altogether morally justifiable action’ (Parsons, 1973: 71). The human rights of those without citizenship was not what was at stake.

Given what I have presented in this article, these excerpts seem illustrative of how the Ugandan Asians and their Expulsion were seen by some UK policy-makers. No one was denying that the Expulsion Order was terrible for the individuals involved, and many agreed that excluding British citizens with no other citizenship from the right to abode in the United Kingdom was brutal. However, this human tragedy and reaction to it was presented as instrumental in wider projects of UK positioning in global politics. Already in 1967, essayist Paul Theroux criticised those who ‘would very much like to see Africa succeed, even at the expense of a pogrom’ (Theroux, 1997). And in his autobiographical account of the Expulsion, Mahmood Mamdani wrote, ‘Bitter experience has taught us that in both Uganda and Britain, it has mattered little what passport we held. Our fate was determined by political and not legal factors’ (Mamdani, 2011). Indeed, Ugandan Asians were not persecuted because they lacked citizenship. Rather, they were persecuted because, as a racial minority in relation to racially defined States, they were considered to be inconvenient for both the Ugandan and the British Governments. Where they lacked citizenship this was a consequence rather than a cause of persecution (Kingston, 2017). And where they held citizenships this did not mean they would be protected by them.

Contemporary British politics of citizenship needs to be seen against this backdrop. There continue to be six categories of nationality in the United Kingdom, only one of which (‘British citizen’) provides the right of abode. The increase in the number of people being deprived of their UK citizenship since 2017 is rooted in policies which systematised racial hierarchy, making some citizens more citizen than others because of their parentage (Batul Naqvi, 2022; Nasar, 2020; Webber, 2022). Discussion of the Windrush scandal has often centred around the relative rights of people arriving in the United Kingdom either before or after the 1971 Act came into force in 1973 (Gentleman, 2019; Zehfuss, 2024). The case of British Chagossians without citizenship wouldn’t be a case at all if it were not still the dusk of empire, and if citizenship and nationality for those who hold it wasn’t stratified (Frost and Murray, 2015). Meanwhile, the bartering around the rights of UK citizens in the European Union (EU) and of citizens of EU States in the United Kingdom shows that British citizen rights continue to be treated as currency in high-level political positioning (Galpin, 2021; Guild, 2016). Empire and the unfinished process of decolonisation continues to impact contemporary British politics of British citizenship, and also British engagement in the international system.

In this article, I have shown that the British politics of British citizenship has been, and continues to be, heavily impacted by Empire, and by the racist ideas that underpin(ned) it. I have demonstrated that decisions about British citizenship policy are taken, not for the individuals concerned nor, for the most part, in response to domestic interests. Instead, British citizenship policies are rooted in the British Governments’ positioning in present and future geopolitics; and also to limit the claims of those who have gained citizenship in the context of prior commitments, derived from prior positionings. Moreover, I have shown how Britain has leveraged its global engagement to launder its citizenship exclusions at home. As I have demonstrated in this article, the United Kingdom drove the drafting, negotiation and adoption of the DHRN, a confused and confusing UN declaration that no one wanted, specifically in order to launder inequality among its citizens.