UK court upholds ruling stripping Shamima Begum’s citizenship

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By Editor_1
The Al Hol refugee camp, which held the wives and children of dead or captured Islamic State fighters, in Kurdish-controlled northern Syria on March 28, 2019. As an American-backed coalition ousted the Islamic State from the territory, Shamima Begum and thousands of other family members of ISIS fighters ended up at the Al Hol camp -Ivor Prickett/The New York Times
By Megan Specia

LONDON — An immigration court in London on Wednesday (22) upheld a 2019 decision by the British government to strip citizenship from Shamima Begum, whose case has been the subject of intense debate since she left the country in 2015 and travelled to Syria from London with two friends to join the Islamic State terrorist group.

The decision, made by a special immigration tribunal and read out in court, comes after Begum appealed the British Home Office’s citizenship ruling in 2019, arguing that it left her stateless. In 2021, she petitioned unsuccessfully to be allowed to travel to Britain from Syria to challenge the decision in person.

In the written judgment, the tribunal dismissed Begum’s appeal on all of the grounds raised by her lawyers, who had argued, among other things, that she was a victim of trafficking and sexual exploitation. Begum’s lawyers have said they will seek to challenge the decision.

Begum’s case set off a fierce debate in Britain after a reporter with The Times of London found her in February 2019 in a refugee camp in Syria, where she told him that she wanted to return home. In response, the British home secretary at the time, Sajid Javid, revoked her citizenship, citing national security risks.

The tribunal on Wednesday did not rule on whether Begum should be allowed to return to Britain, only on whether her citizenship should be reinstated.

Begum, now 23, left her home in East London in February 2015 and travelled to Syria with two friends, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, when they were all 15 or 16. Images of the teenagers passing through Gatwick Airport, near London, quickly came to be seen as a stark warning about how ISIS was using the internet to recruit young people in the West.

Begum lived for several years in territory controlled by the Islamic State. In that time, she married a Dutch fighter and had three children, all of whom have since died.

As a US-backed coalition ousted the Islamic State from the territory where Begum lived, she and thousands of other family members of ISIS fighters ended up at a refugee camp, Al Hol. It was there in 2019 that the British reporter, Anthony Loyd, recognized her accent and realized that she was one of the runaway girls.

The fate of her two friends is unclear. Both married Islamic State fighters and remained in contact with their families for some time from Syria. But both families have told British news outlets that they believe they were killed in strikes.

In an early interview, Begum appeared unrepentant and said that she did not regret joining the Islamic State — though her tone has shifted in subsequent interviews, including for a BBC documentary and podcast this year produced by journalist Josh Baker, which reignited both interest and outrage around her case.

Experts in international citizenship laws and rights advocates maintain that the revocation of Begum’s citizenship could have broader implications for the right not to be rendered stateless.

Critics also accused Javid of using the decision in Begum’s case to score political points at a time when the leadership of the governing Conservative Party was in question: Prime Minister Theresa May resigned months later, and he ran to succeed her.

During the appeal hearing in November, Begum’s lawyers maintained that she had been trafficked for sexual exploitation. In August, a BBC investigation revealed that she had been smuggled into Syria by a Canadian intelligence agent. Despite that, the Home Office said that Begum was still a threat to national security.

“You can still be a risk of setting off a bomb in London or in Manchester,” James Eadie, a lawyer representing the Home Office, told the court in November 2022, according to the BBC. “Even if you have been trafficked at a young age.”

The court ruled that, though there were different opinions about whether her travel to Syria had been voluntary, the government was within its rights to revoke her British citizenship.

In an earlier judgment, the court had also found that stripping Begum of her citizenship was lawful because she was “a citizen of Bangladesh by descent” as her mother was born there and would not, therefore, be left stateless. It reiterated that position in the ruling on Wednesday.

“British citizenship is not an absolute entitlement for everyone,” the court said. “It can be removed by the secretary of state, but not if to do so would render the subject stateless. Many citizens of the United Kingdom are immune from deprivation action for that reason, but not Ms. Begum.”

Officials in Bangladesh have previously declared that there was “no question” of Begum being admitted to the country, saying that she had not sought to claim citizenship there and had never visited.

The British Home Office said in a statement on Wednesday that it was “pleased that the court has found in favour of the government’s position in this case.”

“The government’s priority remains maintaining the safety and security of the UK and we will robustly defend any decision made in doing so,” the statement read.

In written evidence given during the November hearing, Richard Barrett, a former director of counterterrorism at MI6, the British equivalent of the CIA, and Paul Jordan, a senior figure at the nonprofit European Institute of Peace, said that the claim that Begum posed a national security risk was “superficial and inadequate.”

More generally, they said in a joint statement, refusing to repatriate British nationals from northern Syria was “likely to be significantly more dangerous in the medium to long term than repatriating them and subjecting them to prosecution, rehabilitation and reintegration.”

Maya Foa, the director of Reprieve, a British legal nonprofit group, said in a statement that “the court accepted that there is good reason to believe that Shamima Begum was a victim of trafficking,” adding that “the UK should take responsibility for her as it would any trafficked British teenager.”

The nonprofit group also says that Britain’s approach to repatriation is out of step with that of other Western allies.

Many of the women were girls at the time they were trafficked, Foa said, and were held against their will and subjected to sexual and other forms of exploitation. She said that the British government’s policy of revoking Begum’s citizenship was “a political posture, more concerned with headlines than British lives.”

-New York Times

 

 

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