The immigration minister, Peter Dutton, has urged Professor Gillian Triggs to consider resigning as president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, in the latest outbreak of hostilities over asylum-seeker policies and the rule of law.

Triggs spoke out last week about the regional “consequences” of the government’s policy of turning back asylum-seeker boats and called on MPs to uphold the rule of law as they prepared to debate extraordinary new ministerial powers to revoke citizenship of suspected terrorists.

Dutton sharpened his criticism of Triggs on Sunday, two days after he accused her of drawing an inappropriate link between Australia’s immigration policy and Indonesia’s execution of two members of the Bali Nine drug smuggling group.

When asked by the conservative commentator Andrew Bolt whether he would like to see Triggs gone from her position as commission president, Dutton said: “Well, when you reduce the position to basically that of a political advocate, I think it is very difficult to continue on, and these are issues for Professor Triggs to contemplate.”

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Triggs did not resign after the government declared in February that it had lost confidence in her over her handling of an inquiry into children in immigration detention, and has previously rejected accusations of partisanship.

The Human Rights Commission president delivered a forthright speech on Friday in which she criticised the major political parties for teaming up to pass “scores of laws” over the past 15 years that threatened fundamental rights and freedoms.

The Coalition is expected to produce legislation in the next parliamentary sittings to grant the immigration minister the power to revoke the Australian citizenship of a person who was deemed to be involved in terrorism but may not have been convicted of a crime.



Triggs cited the yet-to-be-defined proposal as an example of the “overreach of executive power” and said the debate seemed to be “between the subjective suspicions of a minister versus an evidence-based determination by a judge according to established rule of law”.



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Dutton said the UK had granted its home secretary strong powers to strip people of citizenship and it was “not a legal backwater by any stretch of the imagination”.

The government believed it was “a decision for the minister of the day, because we are elected by the people to make these tough decisions”, he told Channel Ten’s Bolt Report.



Asked why the minister, and not a court, would make the decision, Dutton said: “Well, because we need ministerial discretion around some of the particular cases. So where the 17-year-old Australian goes across and is involved in beheadings and strapping vests on to other young kids who then go off and do suicide bombings – that person may present a very different case than the 17-year-old who went across, got cold feet at the airport and decided to come back home. If we had a black-letter operation of the law and there was no discretion, I think we would get anomalies ... We’re not trying to impose this as a criminal sanction.”

Dutton confirmed the powers would be able to be used against people regardless of whether they were located in Australia or were overseas.



“If they’re involved in the name of terrorism, and their activities are able to be defined within a few sections of the criminal code that we’ve said we’ll put into legislation – if they’re deemed to be a terrorist or acting in support of those terrorists, fundraising, [doing] acts preparatory to, all of those which we’ve defined in the legislation – if they fall within that category and we don’t render them stateless, whether they’re here or they’re offshore, we will strip citizenship from them under this proposal,” he said.

“I think it’s a very important [proposal] because, as I say, I think it has now dawned on all of us how significant this [terrorism] threat is and it is only going to ramp up over the coming years.”

While the government is pressing ahead with new powers in relation to dual nationals, it has deferred a decision about allowing the immigration minister to revoke citizenship from sole nationals who may be able to apply for citizenship elsewhere.

That proposal generated a significant cabinet backlash which spilled into the public arena, but remains on the table thanks to its inclusion as an option in a discussion paper that was released for public consultation.

Dutton said the Coalition backbench “overwhelmingly” supported the government’s strong stance, which he believed reflected views across the broader community.



He reiterated that the government would not leave anyone stateless and would allow people to lodge a judicial review against a ministerial decision to strip them of their citizenship.



The comment about statelessness prompted Bolt to ask: “I don’t understand what the problem is with making people stateless. I mean they joined Islamic State. Good luck to them. Why should I care if they no longer have, you know, any citizenship from here? What’s the problem?”

Dutton replied: “Well, we’ve signed a convention saying that we won’t render somebody stateless so we abide by that principle.”

The Labor leader, Bill Shorten, has offered in-principle support for the proposed changes in relation to dual nationals, but has called for the government to release the detailed legislation so it could be properly examined.

A senior Labor frontbencher, Anthony Albanese, criticised some of the government’s language in the citizenship debate. “You have this ridiculous position ... where it is almost as if some members of the government are trying to say we are more loyal to Australia than others,” Albanese told Sky News on Sunday.