Jack Letts, the convert to Islam who became known as Jihadi Jack when he left the UK to go and fight for ISIS, has finally had his British citizenship revoked. Letts, who is currently being held as a prisoner by Kurdish forces since 2017, is not some child who was dragged by adults to the Syria/Iraqi warzone, but made his own decision to join ISIS at 18, the age of majority in the United Kingdom. He actively decided of his own free will not only to join the death cult that is Islam, but also to go and fight for one of the worst and most bestial terror groups modern Islam has ever produced.

Letts may now be very much regretting his decision to join ISIS and become, in his own words ‘an enemy of Britain’, especially as it is more than likely being held in rather uncomfortable incarceration. However, this is only just and right bearing in mind the degree of his treason and the fact that he without any coercion or trickery and in agreement with the aims of Jihadism, chose this path. I’d say that the treason of Jack Letts is worse morally than that of those who joined the British Freikorps, a small group of Britons, never more than 27 at any one time, who fought for the Nazis during World War II. This is because many of those who joined this unit, made up of British and Dominion POW’s, did so because they were opportunists or because they wanted better food or had been hoodwinked into thinking that the Germans were winning the war and all should turn against Bolshevism. Unlike Jack Letts, who joined ISIS willingly and knowing the full story of both this group and its motivations, those who joined the Freikorps were merely stupid, greedy or easily led. Jack Letts on the other hand knew what he was getting into and as such it is only just that he should pay whatever price his captors decide to ask him to pay.

It’s good that the UK government has finally done the right thing and stripped Jihadi Jack of his British citizenship. However it’s only, as in the case of Shamima Begum the Jihadi Wife, because of circumstances that the government was allowed to do that. It was possible to remove British citizenship from Letts only because he also held, on account of his father, citizenship of Canada, as it is forbidden under international law for a country to make a citizen stateless. It is this legislation that prohibits countries like the United Kingdom from cutting all ties with British citizens who commit acts of treason such as joining terror groups that often end up fighting against British armed forces.

Whilst I accept that the international law on Statelessness was brought in for good and sound reasons such as preventing a future Nazi style dictatorship somewhere stripping some of its citizens of their citizenship rights, I don’t believe that disallowing statelessness so completely is a sound policy for the modern world. It most certainly represents a growing possible security threat.

Being forbidden from declaring a person stateless means that Western governments such as those of the United Kingdom are unable to refuse entry to some very unpleasant jihadis for example. Those ex ISIS members who were born in the UK to parents with British citizenship and who may have committed atrocities in the conflict zone but where there may not be enough evidence to meet the ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ standard, end up walking among us. These jihadis return from conflict zones and drive our minicabs, work in shops, serve food and in a whole host of other areas where should they suffer in the future from ‘sudden jihad syndrome’, could do a great deal of collateral and financial damage to the United Kingdom.

I doubt even if these returning jihadis are being properly monitored by the security forces. There are after all thousands of such jihad supporting Muslims in the UK, of various degrees of concern and levels of extremism, who need to be monitored by the police and MI5. I believe that there are now so many of these Islamic extremists that need to be watched and prioritised according to their potential danger, that the time is coming soon when there will be too many to effectively watched.

Britain has an enormous problem with home grown Islamic terrorism from Muslims who at present cannot be prevented from coming back to the UK and who may not even face any sanction for their overseas activities with Jihadist groups. There should be a legal way, with due legal process of course, for the Government to declare that a British Muslim (and let’s face it most terror problems in Britain are Islamic in nature) who either leaves the UK to fight for a terror organisation or who recruits for them in the UK, can be exiled and declared as Stateless. Yes this would put the individual concerned in a position where they had to scrabble round to find a country that would take them in, but it would make Britons of all races and faiths, much more secure from the problem of Islamic terrorism.

The International Conventions against Statelessness are, as well as putting the brake on what could be a very effective method of keeping Islamic terrorists out of Britain and curtailing their activities at home, is also exploited by illegal migrants. An illegal migrant in search of housing and benefits in somewhere like the United Kingdom only has to rip up their travel documents and claim that they are from such and such a country instead of the country which they are actually from. Because of the difficulty in establishing a true identity and nationality for the individual illegal migrant it becomes virtually impossible to deport the illegal migrant either to his real country of origin or the one that they claim to come from. As the receiving nation cannot establish where the migrant truly comes from they end up letting the migrant stay either permanently or ‘temporarily’ with all the problems that such inappropriate and unwanted migration brings.

The Jack Letts case I hope shines a light for some on the workings of the International Conventions against Statelessness. Whilst I believe that these conventions were brought in for good reasons at the time when they were brought in, it seems obvious to me now that the world has moved on. We are not facing a new Hitler who is stripping the citizenship of a portion of their citizens but instead a much more nebulous enemy that is, unlike Germany’s Jews in the 1930’s, able to use our own laws to attack us. We are in a situation where those who wish to destroy us or at the best just hate us and want to parasite off of us as do the Jihadis and their sympathisers, are using international law brought in for one reason for one that the framers of this legislation could not have foreseen.

The International Conventions against Statelessness may have been good in their inception, but they have outlived a lot of their usefulness at best and have at worst become a hindrance to keeping Western nations safe from Islamic terrorism. I would like to see a consortium of Western nations withdraw from these conventions and regain the ability to exile and strip citizenship from our Islamic nasties. Whilst I understand the objections of others to the idea of abandoning the Statelessness Conventions to them I would say that the situation is now very different from what it was when these conventions were first proposed and formulated. We need as Western nations a way to both remove those who are the enemies of our countries whilst at the same time giving our enemies or perceived enemies a fair chance through the courts of challenging a citizenship removal. Reform if not abandonment of the Statelessness Conventions is now sorely required, because if we cannot keep the problems out then it is likely that the problems that we have with Islamic extremism will worsen.