Citizenship or Silence? The Moral Impact of the UK’s New Citizenship Law on Refugee Survivors of Modern Slavery

This dissertation critically analyses the moral and legal implications of recent reforms to UK migration laws, especially the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, the Modern Slavery Act 2015, and the Illegal Migration Act 2023, for the treatment of refugee survivors of modern slavery. It suggests that those laws have reshaped the British asylum and citizenship complex, displacing a jurisprudence of rights with one primary concerned with deterrence, control and conditionality. Traumatised and focused on crossing irregular channels, survivors are asked to produce an overabundance of evidence. Drawing on trauma theory, moral philosophy and comparative legal analysis, this dissertation examines how the UK asylum system demands an ordered and dispassionate testimony that overlooks the fractured and non-linear nature of trauma. It has survivors’ fear of death because they are punished for being a late or inconsistent discloser, and their silence is equated with dishonesty. The research shows how deservingness turns citizenship into a bribe for being compliant rather than an admission of mutual humanity. Through qualitative research analysis and survivor accounts, the study demonstrates how institutional mechanisms, including the National Referral Mechanism, often re-traumatises victims without offering lasting protection. A comparison with the model provided for in Article 18 of Italian law reveals the potential of more trauma-sensitive and rights-based approaches that place recovery at the centre of the process, rather than requiring cooperation with law enforcement as a condition for support. Ultimately, the dissertation concludes that the UK’s migration governance is failing as it contravenes international obligations under the Palermo Protocol and Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights., The redress of this means an extensive reform to asylum and citizenship policy which centres unconditional protection, elevates life-led models or worth, and conceives citizenship not as a conditional entitlement but as a right integrated within dignity, care, and justice.