You’ve made your choice
Judges reject IS bride’s citizenship appeal
JIHADI bride Shamima Begum yesterday lost her first attempt to win back British citizenship through the courts.
Judges ruled that she made her own choice when she ran away to join Islamic State in Syria as a 15-year-old schoolgirl and her plight was not Britain’s responsibility.
They said she was lawfully stripped of British citizenship and that she has no right to return to the country to make her case to get it back.
It ended the first stage of her appeal against former home secretary Sajid Javid’s decision to remove her citizenship.
It means Miss Begum, now 20, who has given birth to and lost three children while in Syria, must remain in a refugee camp run by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that helped defeat Islamic State.
Her lawyers plan to take her case to the Court of Appeal, saying she is in great danger in Syria. Miss Begum’s initial appeal was heard by three judges at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, which deals with immigration and security cases.
One of the judges Doron Blum noted that Miss Begum was associated with IS and detained by the SDF, before adding: ‘She was in that situation as a result of her own choices, and of the actions of others, but not because of anything the secretary of state had done.’
Miss Begum was one of three girls from east London who left their homes and families to join IS in 2015. She has said she married Dutch jihadist Yago Riedijk soon after her arrival.
She was stripped of her citizenship last February after she told journalists who found her at a camp in northern Syria she wanted to return to Britain. MI5 had advised Mr Javid she was a threat to national security.
Miss Begum, whose third baby died in March last year, is now in the SDF’s Al-Roj camp. The appeals commission ruling said conditions there are reportedly ‘squalid and wretched’.
Miss Begum’s lawyers argued she was a British citizen because of her birth in Britain to parents living in this country and that the decision to remove her citizenship was unlawful because it made her stateless.
But the commission said she had a right to Bangladeshi citizenship because her parents were both from that country.
The Home Office welcomed the judgment but said ‘it would be inappropriate to comment further whilst legal proceedings are ongoing’.