Shamima Begum Loses First Stage Of Appeal Over Removal Of Her UK Citizenship

07/02/2020

The Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) has rejected the first stage of Shamima Begum's appeal against the UK government's decision to remove her status as a British national.

Shamima was a child when she left London in 2015, aged just 15, to join Islamic State. She had been groomed by members of ISIS for some time. Moreover, the police had identified the risk that she was being groomed when they interviewed her and six other girls, after another girl from the same school left for Syria the previous December.

The families of these six girls were not told that they had been subjected to police interviews. This left those families without the information that could have helped stop three of the girls from subsequently running to also join ISIS. Shamima left and headed for Syria with two other Bethnal Green Academy pupils, 15-year-old Amira Abase and 16-year-old Kadiza Sultana.

Once Shamima, Amira and Kadiza were found to have also ran away, Tower Hamlets Council took the decision to make the four remaining girls 'wards of court' to shelter them from any further contact with those responsible for the grooming and protect them from the consequences of potential radicalisation.

Shamima was found in a Syrian refugee camp in February 2019 by a Times journalist. Sajid Javid, who was then the Home Secretary, wasted no time in stripping her of her UK citizenship. This was criticised by some at the time, as Shamima was UK born and bred and had apparently never visited Bangladesh; which is where at least one of her parents was born.

By removing her UK citizenship, Sajid Javid was refusing to acknowledge that Shamima is our problem, not anyone else's. Bangladesh is not her home; she has never been there. Her home is the UK.

        She was born in the UK.

        She was raised in the UK.

        She was groomed in the UK.

        She was radicalised in the UK.

I'm not saying that the UK should welcome her back with joy, but we should accept her back into the country and make efforts to undo the radicalisation that robbed her of the end of her childhood.

Her tribunal was held by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC). This is a court which hears national security cases and can therefore be very secretive. The SIAC ruled that stripping Ms Begum of her British nationality was allowable, as they believed she had not been left stateless.

They said she had Bangladesh citizenship.

It should be noted that the Bangladesh Government had denied that Shamima was a Bangladesh citizen.

Bangladeshi legislation on nationality and citizenship is covered by several different Acts of law and are a bit confusing. Some of it appears a little contradictory.

The British government had decided that Shamima could have her UK citizenship revoked, as they considered her to also have Bangladeshi citizenship; even though she had never been to Bangladesh and only had a UK passport. The Government of Bangladesh, for their part, were very clear in stating that she was not a Bangladeshi citizen, and had never applied to obtain Bangladeshi citizenship.

The SIAC had analysed each of the elements of the Bangladeshi legislation and decided that Ms Begum was legally a Bangladeshi citizen, as well as being a British citizen. As a result, they found that the decision of the Home Office to deprive her of her British citizenship did not legally render her stateless.

This suggested that the measures taken by Sajid Javid were not unlawful; as far as the issue of statelessness was concerned.

However, there is the possibility that his actions were unlawful on other grounds; possibly under British law, possibly under international law.

None of this detracts from the underlying fact that Shamima was UK born and bred.

She was born in the UK.

She was raised in the UK.

She was groomed in the UK.

She was radicalised in the UK.

If a British couple moved to another country and then had children, who were citizens of that country and had not shown any interest in UK citizenship or visited the UK, I don't think we would be happy to accept them as British just because the other country had decided they no longer wanted them.  I don't think we would, as a country, welcome that criminal; regardless of what their crimes were.

I cannot think of an example where a foreign born criminal has been accepted into the UK on the basis of lineage.

It seems completely unreasonable for us to suggest another country accepts responsibility for a terrorist, who was born and raised in the UK and 'formally' holds only British citizenship.

We as a country, or more specifically the UK intelligence services, should have identified Shamima as a victim of grooming.  We should have prevented her, and her two friends, from following another girl in fleeing Britain and heading for a life with ISIS.

Hopefully, the authorities have now acknowledged the risks posed to our children of being groomed by terror organisations. Hopefully, we are doing more to protect them from radicalisation.

For now though, the UK government should reverse the action taken by Sajid Javid and restore Shamima's citizenship.  She should be brought back to the UK and should face prosecution.  However, the fact that she was groomed and radicalised as a child should be considered in mitigation of her crimes.

I don't know whether she can be deradicalised. However, it is the UK's responsibility to try.