Australia plans to strip citizenship of native-born ‘terrorists’

Australia has unveiled plans to increase government powers to strip the citizenship of the people convicted of “terrorism” and to control the movements of Australian fighters who return home from the battlefields of Syria and Iraq.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said that his government wanted powers to expel anyone convicted of a “terrorist” offence, even native-born Australians, as he singled out Muslim leaders as having a “special responsibility” to prevent acts of violence committed by members of the community. “People who commit acts of terrorism have rejected absolutely everything that this country stands for,” Mr Morrison told a press conference in Sydney. “This is something that can’t be tolerated, and for those who would engage in this sort of activity, and they have citizenship elsewhere, or we have reason to believe they do, they can go.”

This comes a day after Muslim leaders in Australia boycotted a roundtable meeting called by the conservative leader, who has asked the Muslim community to do more to halt attacks in the country. Community leaders, in an open letter, said they are “deeply concerned and disappointed” with statements made by the prime minister and senior officials, which “infer that the community is collectively culpable for the criminal actions of individuals and should be doing more to prevent such acts of violence”.

“These statements have achieved nothing to address underlying issues, but rather, have alienated large segments of the Muslim community,” they said in the letter published by Australian media.