The French Interior Ministry has vastly expanded the use of decrees stripping citizenship from convicted Islamist terrorists, with over five times the number of orders reportedly being logged over the past three years than the 30 years before.
According to figures obtained by French paper of record Le Figaro, over 70 decrees revoking citizenship from convicted terrorists have been issued by the Ministry of Interior, and around 100 have been handed down since 2015. This compares with just 13 during the entire period between 1979 and 2015. The paper reported that 15 have been issued so far this year, while 19 were issued in 2025, 37 in 2024, and 12 in 2023.
A senior official at the Hôtel de Beauvau told the paper that there are “several hundred” more cases that are set to be dealt with over the next five years as convicted terrorists are released from prison. The Interior Ministry source said that around 45 per cent of those stripped of their citizenship have been French-Moroccan dual nationals, followed by French-Algerians, French-Tunisians, and French-Turks, all of whom represent around 10 per cent of cases.
The official credited the increase to former Interior Minsiter Gérald Darmanin, who is now serving as Justice Minister.
“[President] Emmanuel Macron was initially rather hostile to them, and it was his minister who, following his appointment to the Interior Ministry in 2020, made the State more confident on this issue… The minister had become aware that many dual nationals sentenced to three to five years in prison in France for having gone to jihadist zones—the so-called returnees—were going to be released en masse, according to a cohort effect, particularly from 2022 onwards, which had to be anticipated at all costs.”
While there has been a significant increase in the government’s willingness to strip citizenship from convicted terrorists, the effort still pales in comparison to the number of terrorists released from prison in recent years, with 339 jihadis being released since 2021.
A key impediment cited by the report is that for the Ministry of the Interior to issue such a decree, a convicted terrorist needs to have a second nationality, as French law does not allow the stripping of citizenship from those who would become stateless. In addition to those who have lost their previous citizenship, this also means that terrorists who were born in France are typically exempt from such a process.
Other complications arise in the case of a dual-national terrorist who was a minor at the time they went abroad to fight for a jihadi group like ISIS, with the left-leaning Council of State needing to be consulted in such cases.
The decision to revoke citizenship also does not necessarily mean that terrorists will be removed from the country, as residency is not technically determined by citizenship. This may serve as an initial advantage for the French state, as it prevents the jihadis from appealing to EU-level courts on the basis of having their right to a family life infringed upon. According to the Le Figaro report, some 60 appeals have been filed since 2003, all of which have failed.
However, it means that many terrorists will be free to remain in the country longer than they would have otherwise. Indeed, the French government has consistently struggled to remove criminal migrants from its territory, with just 6.9 per cent of OQTF (“Obligation de Quitter le Territoire Français”) deportation orders fulfilled in 2022.
This then raises the possibility of repeat terror attacks, with none of the terrorists who had their French citizenship revoked between 2023 and 2026 expressing any remorse over their crimes. The report found that none of them would even renounce Islamism or their radicalisation.
France, with a large Muslim population largely imported from its former colonial holdings in North Africa, has been particularly hard hit by Islamic terrorism in Europe, with a report last year finding that the country has averaged a deadly terror attack nearly every six months over the previous decade. During the same time, some 50 non-fatal attacks occurred, and 80 more Islamist plots were foiled by police.