A woman who left the United Kingdom to join ISIS at the age of 15 has lost her Court of Appeal challenge over the decision to remove her British citizenship.
Shamima Begum flew to Syria in 2015 with two school friends to join the terror group. While there, she married an ISIS fighter and spent several years living in Raqqa.
Begum then reappeared in al-Hawl, a Syrian refugee camp, in 2019. She made international headlines as an “ISIS bride” after pleading with the UK government to be allowed to return to her home country for the birth of her son.
Then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid removed her British citizenship in February that year, and Begum’s newborn son died in a Syrian refugee camp the following month. She told UK media she had two other children prior to that baby, who also died in Syria during infancy.
Under UK law they’re not allowed to remove citizenship if it would render the person stateless. However, when the UK was investigating whether they’d have to take her back (and they really didn’t want to), they realized that she [has? is entitled to?] Bangladeshi citizenship, something that neither she nor the Bangladeshi government was aware of. So they stripped her of her UK citizenship and said that she was now Bangladesh’s problem. Bangladesh (to put it politely) disagrees, so she remains in a Syrian camp.
She was radicalized on UK’s soil. But they want Bangladesh to deal with the consequences, based on a mere technicality? That’s disrespectful, underhanded and sly, to put it mildly.
She’s literally British. She was raised here and it’s the sole citizenship she holds. What we are doing is illegal and a shirking of our responsibilities to Syrian people, Bangladeshi people, and her. If she’s a criminal and an extremist, it’s our job to accept her back and deal with that. If she was an adolescent who made a series of terrible errors, endured the most traumatic things, and is genuinely repentant, it’s our job to accept her back and deal with that.
Yeah but since when has the UK government cared about doing illegal things. If you gave them two possible options they would automatically pick the illegal one just on principal.
For anyone reading this comment and assuming it’s facetious, may I please direct your attention to the Rwanda asylum “plan”?
The whole thing was literally thought up in a 10 minute session with Boris Johnson to try to distract from the fact that he was having parties during the time he was telling everyone else to be in lockdown, because he is and always was a brainless bellend. It was literally a plan that was never thought out and was created entirely to distract the media, and then unsurprisingly it didn’t work. For some reason Rishi then decided that he would revive it, despite the fact that it was thought up by an idiot in a panic.
As I understand it international law bans making a person stateless. Bangladeshi law says that any person born of Bangladeshi parents is automatically viewed as Bangladeshi / dual nationality until their twenty first birthday. Any time prior to that age you can apply for full or dual nationality but if you do not your Bangladeshi citizenship rights will lapse at 21. The UK’s legal argument is that as she was below this age when her UK citizenship was stripped she was not made stateless… they don’t care if Bangladesh takes her or not. They just had to prove that by revoking her UK citizenship the UK didn’t break international law.
That’s still skirting responsibility. Banking on a technicality. I’m pretty sure that this is not what the UN intended when they made such a provision. If the UK wants to disown her, they should be ready to accept responsibility for it too.
Yeah, maybe so, but regardless of my own personal view I just wanted to clear up the legal argument surrounding the case. The ethics and morality behind it is not really for the court to decide.