SECOND SECTION
DECISION
Application no. 37478/20
Minh Quang PHAM
against the United Kingdom
The European Court of Human Rights (Second Section), sitting on 2 June 2026 as a Committee composed of:
Péter Paczolay, President,
Oddný Mjöll Arnardóttir,
Hugh Mercer, judges,
and Dorothee von Arnim, Deputy Section Registrar,
Having regard to:
the application (no. 37478/20) against the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland lodged with the Court under Article 34 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (“the Convention”) on 20 August 2020 by a Vietnamese national, Mr Minh Quang Pham (“the applicant”), who was born in 1983, is detained in the United States and was represented by Ms S. Joshi (JD Spicer Zeb Solicitors), a lawyer practising in London;
the decision to give notice of the application to the British Government (“the Government”), represented by their Agent, Mr S. Linehan, of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office;
the observations submitted by the respondent Government and the observations in reply submitted by the applicant;
the joint comments submitted by the AIRE Centre (Advice on Individual Rights in Europe), and the ENS (European Network on Statelessness), who were granted leave to intervene by the President of the Section;
Having deliberated, decides as follows:
SUBJECT MATTER OF THE CASE
1. The applicant was born in Vietnam and acquired British nationality in 1995, when he was around twelve years old. He is married to a British citizen and they have two children, born in 2011 and 2012.
2. In 2011 the Secretary of State decided to deprive the applicant of his British nationality following an assessment by the security services that he was involved in terrorism-related activities and had links to a number of Islamist extremists. The Vietnamese Government subsequently refused to acknowledge the applicant’s Vietnamese citizenship. The applicant challenged the making of the deprivation order in the United Kingdom before the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (“SIAC”) arguing, among other things, that the order would leave him stateless. Since the applicable legislation prohibits deprivation of citizenship in circumstances where the person concerned would be made stateless, SIAC identified the question whether he would be left stateless as a preliminary issue to be determined in a first stage of proceedings. The statelessness point was ultimately appealed to the Supreme Court where a hearing took place in November 2014.
3. In early 2015 the applicant was extradited to the United States where, in 2016, he pleaded guilty to terrorism-related offences. He was sentenced in May 2016 to 40 years’ imprisonment.
4. Meanwhile, in March 2015, the Supreme Court found that the applicant would not be de jure stateless on account of the deprivation order as he retained Vietnamese nationality by operation of law. The Supreme Court remitted the case to SIAC to determine any remaining grounds of appeal against the deprivation order.
5. Upon remission, the Secretary of State applied to SIAC to have the appeal against the making of the deprivation order struck out on the grounds that it did not have prospects of success following the rejection of the applicant’s statelessness arguments. The applicant opposed the strike-out application and sought to demonstrate that there was a prospect that his appeal would be successful. On 16 December 2016 SIAC struck out his appeal and on 20 September 2018 the Court of Appeal upheld that decision. The Supreme Court refused leave to appeal on 3 December 2019.
6. The applicant complained of a violation of Article 8 of the Convention as a result of the decision to deprive him of his British nationality.
THE COURT’S ASSESSMENT
7. The applicant argued that the decision to deprive him of his nationality was incompatible with his right to respect for his private and family life because it was not proportionate and because his personal circumstances had not been taken into account. He alleged that it amounted to an unjustified interference with his social identity and left him de facto stateless. He further alleged that the aim of the deprivation order was to prevent him living in the United Kingdom where his family resided, that the way in which the law had been applied was not sufficiently foreseeable for the measure to be in accordance with the law and that there were insufficient procedural safeguards in the proceedings.
8. The Government contended that the applicant had not exhausted domestic remedies. He had not relied on Article 8 “at least in substance” and had accordingly not given the domestic courts the opportunity to address the alleged breach. The applicant acknowledged that he did not raise Article 8 of the Convention in the context of the relevant domestic proceedings leading to the strike out of his challenge to the deprivation order. He indicated that his lawyers were of the opinion that Article 8 “would [add] nothing to EU law (as well as common law arguments)”. He explained that European Union law offered protections at least as extensive as the Convention and that it essentially imported Article 8 standards. In view of these considerations, his position was that he had invoked Article 8 in substance.
9. Article 35 § 1 of the Convention requires that the complaints intended to be made subsequently in Strasbourg should have been made to the appropriate domestic body, at least in substance, and in compliance with the formal requirements and time-limits laid down in domestic law (Vučković and Others v. Serbia (preliminary objection) [GC], nos. 17153/11 and 29 others, § 72, 25 March 2014). For an applicant to show that he has exhausted domestic remedies as required by Article 35 § 1, it is not sufficient that he has exercised another remedy which could have overturned the impugned measure on other grounds not connected with the complaint of a violation of a Convention right. It is the Convention complaint which must have been aired at national level for there to have been exhaustion of “effective remedies” (ibid., § 75; Peacock v. the United Kingdom (dec.), no. 52335/12, § 33, 5 January 2016; and Lee v. the United Kingdom (dec.), no. 18860/19, § 68, 7 December 2021).
10. The adversarial nature of proceedings in the United Kingdom imposes on claimants the very limited burden of asserting the grounds for challenge in their case and any rights upon which they seek to rely (see Peacock, cited above, § 39). Domestic courts are not required to engage in a search for additional points which have not been pleaded. Pursuant to section 7 of the Human Rights Act 1998 (“the 1998 Act”), Convention rights can be relied upon in any proceedings in the United Kingdom where it is alleged that a public authority has acted in a manner incompatible with Convention rights. There is therefore no doubt that the applicant could have challenged the making of the deprivation order by the Secretary of State on the ground that it amounted to an unlawful interference with his right to respect for private and family life under Article 8 of the Convention and that, as a matter of English procedural law, was required to do so if he wished the courts to examine this matter. It was also open to him to cite relevant case-law of this Court in support of his submissions, which the domestic courts would have had to take into account in determining whether the decision to deprive him of British nationality was compatible with Article 8 (see section 2(1) of the 1998 Act; compare also Peacock, cited above, §§ 26 and 37).
11. The applicant appears to have raised Article 8 based on his family life and ties to the United Kingdom in his initial grounds of appeal against the deprivation order lodged in early 2012 while he was still in the United Kingdom; he also argued that the order would leave him stateless. As explained above (see paragraph 2), SIAC defined the question of statelessness as a preliminary issue to be determined before any other grounds of appeal were examined since the legislation precluded a deprivation order where a person would be made stateless as a result. The applicant’s Article 8 ground was not relied on by the applicant in relation to the preliminary issue but was put aside to be considered at a later stage, once the preliminary question of statelessness had been decided. Before the statelessness issue was finally determined in March 2015, the applicant had been extradited to the United States on terrorism charges (see paragraphs 3-4 above).
12. Once the case was remitted to SIAC after the 2015 Supreme Court judgment, the focus of his challenge to the deprivation order was on whether it was necessary under the applicable legislation to show a risk of current harm when making a decision to deprive a person of his nationality, or whether past misconduct would suffice. His position was that in view of his incarceration in the United States and his envisaged release date, it could not be said that he posed a current risk of harm in the United Kingdom. There is no evidence that he relied on an intention to pursue an appeal against the deprivation order on the basis of Article 8 of the Convention or sought to demonstrate why such Article 8 argument had realistic prospects of success: indeed, he has conceded that he did not raise Article 8 of the Convention in the context of the proceedings on the Secretary of State’s application to strike out his appeal against the deprivation order (see paragraph 8 above). The Court underlines, in this respect, that when he invoked Article 8 in his grounds of appeal against the deprivation order lodged in early 2012, the applicant had not yet been extradited to the United States (see paragraphs 2‑3 and 11 above). The family life arguments that appear to have underpinned his Article 8 arguments in 2012 were no longer relevant in circumstances where he was separated from his family for a lengthy period of time on account of his conviction and 40-year prison sentence in the United States (see paragraph 3 above) and he effectively abandoned his Article 8 ground by not relying on it to defend the Secretary of State’s application to strike out the appeal.
13. In its judgment of 20 September 2018 (see paragraph 5 above), the Court of Appeal subsequently identified the primary question of law before it as being whether a deprivation order could be made where the applicant no longer posed a current risk of harm to the United Kingdom because he had been sentenced to imprisonment in the United States. The court recorded that a list of five precise issues raised by the appeal had been agreed by counsel in the case. Although the issues identified included the applicant’s contention that SIAC had failed to consider proportionality under common law and European Union law, none of the issues concerned the potential applicability of Article 8 in the circumstances of the case or the compatibility of the deprivation order with Article 8 of the Convention. In the context of an argument that an individualised approach was needed, counsel for the applicant argued that it was necessary to weigh his individual interests against the public interest. He referred, without invoking Article 8, to the applicant’s “significant level of ties” with the United Kingdom and the fact that his wife and children were there; and to his de facto statelessness and the fact that without citizenship he would be denied all the benefits of consular protection. In the context of his argument on proportionality under common law and EU law, counsel underlined that that the applicant had only de jure citizenship of Vietnam and had no real ties with that country; that the principle of proportionality required the court to find “the least restrictive and invasive means of achieving the purpose of the legislation”; and that domestic law provided at least the same level of protection as EU law. None of these arguments, presented in the framework of a challenge based on common law and EU law, invited the Court of Appeal to consider the applicability of Article 8 or the compatibility of the order with that Article.
14. As noted above, the adversarial nature of proceedings in England placed the onus on the applicant, who was legally represented, to identify and pursue all relevant points (see paragraph 10). Had the applicant relied on arguments based on Article 8 of the Convention in the remitted proceedings before SIAC and, subsequently, the Court of Appeal, the courts would have been required to address the arguments advanced in this respect (ibid.). They would have had to turn their minds to the extent to which there was an interference with the applicant’s right to private or family life, in view of the developments following the applicant’s extradition in 2015, on account of the consequences of the deprivation order in circumstances where the applicant was serving a very lengthy sentence of imprisonment in the United States (see, for example, Alpeyeva and Dzhalagoniya v. Russia, nos. 7549/09 and 33330/11, §§ 111-15, 12 June 2018; Usmanov v. Russia, no. 43936/18, §§ 59‑62, 22 December 2020; and El Aroud and B.S. v. Belgium, nos. 25491/18 and 27629/18, §§ 57-60, 5 December 2024). They would have been obliged to take into account the relevant case-law of this Court in determining whether the deprivation of nationality was arbitrary, which requires consideration of whether the measures were lawful; whether the applicants enjoyed procedural safeguards, and in particular whether they had access to appropriate judicial review; and whether the authorities acted diligently and promptly (see, for example, K2 v. the United Kingdom (dec.), no. 42387/13, §§ 49-50, 7 February 2017; Ghoumid and Others v. France, nos. 52273/16 and 4 others, § 44, 25 June 2020; and Usmanov, cited above, § 63). However, in accordance with English rules of procedure, in the light of the applicant’s failure to invoke Article 8 or to cite any of the relevant case‑law of this Court in support of his position that his appeal still had reasonable prospects of success, the domestic courts limited their examination to the arguments advanced by the applicant under common law and EU law. As already explained, there is therefore no analysis in the judgments of the applicability of Article 8 or of the deprivation order’s compliance with Article 8 of the Convention by reference to the test set out in the Court’s case-law.
15. In these circumstances, the Court concludes that the applicant did not air his complaint under Article 8 of the Convention before the appropriate domestic courts, at least in substance, in compliance with the formal requirements laid down in domestic law (see paragraph 9 above). As a result of this omission, he did not provide the domestic courts with the opportunity which is in principle intended to be afforded to a Contracting State by Article 35 § 1 of the Convention, namely the opportunity of addressing, and thereby preventing or putting right, the particular Convention violation alleged against it (see Peacock, § 40, and Lee, § 77, both cited above).
16. It follows that the application must be rejected as inadmissible in accordance with Article 35 §§ 1 and 4 of the Convention.
For these reasons, the Court, unanimously,
Declares the application inadmissible.
Done in English and notified in writing on 25 June 2026.
Dorothee von Arnim Péter Paczolay
Deputy Registrar President