UK NOT ENTITLED TO STRIP BEGUM OF PASSPORT
BRITAIN’S business is normally not our concern. But when their government perpetrates the excesses of an apartheid state, their actions become the concern of all states. When Home Secretary Sajid Javid stripped Shamima Begum of her British citizenship, rendering her stateless and directly leading to the death of her child, he did just that.
Begum was born and bred in London. She attended school at Bethnal Green Academy. She was a citizen of the UK. In terms of an International Court of Justice decision, in international law she was a UK national vis-a-vis other states (regardless of what British law may provide) because of her genuine connection to her country of birth.
As a citizen she had rights which could not be removed without due process. She also had an obligation to obey UK law or face legal consequences.
In February 2015, aged 15, and still too young to hold a driving licence, vote or abandon her citizenship, she and two school friends left home to join Islamic State (IS).
She married a 27-year-old Dutchman who had joined IS the previous year. They lived in Raqqa, the caliphate’s de facto capital. Begum bore two children there. The girl died from malnutrition and the boy due to lack of medical facilities.
IS suffered defeat. Her husband surrendered and she became a refugee in a camp in northern Syria, where her third child, Jarrah, was born. She sought to return to Britain with him.
Last week, at the stroke of a pen, Begum suffered a similar fate to millions of black South Africans who were deprived of all the rights of a citizen in the country where they were born and bred.
Stranded in a refugee camp, Jarrah died of pneumonia last week. He was less than three weeks old.
Like our formerly oppressed people. Begum was not afforded a hearing before her rights were removed, although Britain was bound by international law not to arbitrarily deprive her of her nationality (section 15(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
It is impermissible in international law for a state to render its own citizen stateless. Britain has ratified the Convention on Reduction of Statelessness and has assumed international treaty obligations in that regard.
But then law and human rights have hardly been a concern of Conservative home secretaries in the recent past.
Javid holds his position because his predecessor, Amber Rudd, resigned after misleading the home affairs select committee by falsely denying that the UK had deportation targets for (in practice, mostly black) immigrants.
“That’s not how we operate,” Rudd said. In fact, that is exactly how the UK operates. Her predecessor, Theresa May, formulated the “hostile environment” policy which led to the Windrush scandal, during which it emerged that more than 60 Afro-Caribbean British citizens were wrongly deported; others lost their jobs or homes or were denied benefits or medical care to which they were entitled.
Begum is an awkward cause celebre. Quite probably she has committed crimes. Jarrah had not. Both were punished without a trial. To render unwanted citizens stateless is the behaviour of fascists and Nazis. Britain knows this and was using the fact that her mother is Bangladeshi to try to force Bangladesh to take her.
They argue that although Begum is not a Bangladeshi citizen, she could become one.
Were this argument to gain traction, it would provide legal precedent for some future British prime minister to deprive nearly 7 million British Irish of their British citizenship.
Painfully recently, some London pubs’ windows would bear signs reading: “No blacks. No Irish. No dogs.” If you put it to May that she was setting a precedent to remove all British Irish of their citizenship, she would surely deny it. “We would never do that to the Irish!” This may be true. We can see to whom she would do it, and is.
Donen SC is an advocate at the Cape Bar and listed counsel of the International Criminal Court.