Under the new bill, Britain will have the right to suspend the passports of suspected jihadists returning to the country, without revoking their citizenship, Mr Cameron said in an address to the Australian parliament. British authorities would also have to power to stop suspected jihadists from leaving the UK. Those who insist on returning will have to agree to monitoring and de-radicalisation programmes, said the PM, who is in Australia for this weekend's G20 summit of the world's major economies.
What's changed since September?
It seems the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition has thrashed out a compromise on the issue since September, when Mr Cameron mooted plans to strip suspected jihadists of their passports only to have the notion blocked by the Lib Dems on the grounds that it violated British and international law.
At a joint press conference with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott after his address, Cameron was asked whether the new measures would violate international law by making citizens stateless. "Well, what we're doing is making sure that our police and intelligence services have all the tools that they require to keep people safe in the United Kingdom," he replied. "And so there's the power to take away people's passports, the power to stop people travelling, and there's the power to exclude people temporarily until they return under our express instructions, and we'll be announcing more details of more of our plans later on."
Helen Fenwick, professor of law at Durham University, says these latest proposals are an improvement on what the government suggested previously.
"What seems to have happened is that since September there have been discussions with the Lib Dems and lawyers and they've come up with this idea of temporary exclusion orders, which would be enforced abroad," she said. "As long as they are enforced — there will be some practical difficulties — then there wouldn't be such an idea of rendering people stateless because they could be returned to the UK on a managed basis."
"It's an improvement on what was said before — there are more safeguards," she said.
Vulnerable youngsters
Though the temporary exclusion orders are a controversial measure which will be difficult to implement, at least to start with, Fenwick points out that "if the government simply allowed people to return who then mounted a terrorist attack when they could have intervened, then it would appear that the government was acting irresponsibly."
The new bill also allows for passports to be seized on reasonable suspicion for up to 30 days, subject to a judge's reviews. Fenwick says this is intended largely as a deterrent to people travelling abroad in the first place, and is a "proportionate measure", particularly given the fact that several young people have gone to join the fighters without their parents' knowledge, and some have been killed.
"The government is saying, ‘well, we are intervening, but these people may be young and impulsive; all we're doing is preventing them from travelling for a period of time — they're not being detained'."
As to whether there is a real security threat, she says that "various conspiracies have been unveiled recently, and a large number of arrests have been made — some of those relate to returnees from Syria. So on the basis of the information we have, it appears there is a problem."
"We've tried the Prevent initiative, we've tried control orders, we've tried early intervention charges, but this is a specific problem of people travelling. I think this is the most reasonable response for this particular situation," she says.
Britain in spotlight over foreign fighters
A United Nations Security Council report published last month stated that the number of foreign jihadists travelling to fight with Islamic State in Iraq and Syria since 2010 exceeds the cumulative total of the 20 preceding years "many times."
It's estimated that some 2,500 Western Europeans have gone to fight as jihadists, of whom around 500-600 are Britons.
The beheading in August of US journalist James Foley by a hooded fighter with a London accent has turned a spotlight on Britain's response to the problem.
The West's policy response so far has often focused more on prevention and punishment than on dissuasion or reintegration. Now, with returnees on the increase, governments are having to look more closely at what draws individuals to jihadism, what happens to them while they are fighting abroad, and why they come back.
Britain's Muslim community, whose leaders have repeatedly condemned the extremist Islamic State, is approaching 3 million and accounts for some 4.5 per cent of the population.
Earlier this month, Secretary of State William Hague said that British jihadists who return from fighting in Syria and Iraq will be given support to recover from their experiences if they have "good intentions" about preventing others from joining the violence.
"We haven't had a lot of people coming back yet and saying they want to be of assistance, but if they do of course the government, the police, the National Health Service will work with those people and help them to recover and to assist others," he said.
