Jihadi bride loses bid to regain British citizenship
Supporters furious at ‘shameful’ ruling
RUNAWAY Islamic State bride Shamima Begum has lost her bid to win back British citizenship.
The 24-year-old who fled to Syria at 15 had her citizenship revoked on national security grounds.
Yesterday’s Appeal Court decision that the Home Office acted legally outraged human rights organisations.
Maya Foa of refugee group Reprieve said:
“This shames ministers who would rather bully a child victim of trafficking than acknowledge the
UK’s responsibilities.”
Giving the ruling, Lady
Chief Justice Baroness
Carr said: “It could be said the decision in Ms Begum’s case was harsh.
“It could also be argued that she’s the author of her own misfortune.
“Our only task is to assess whether deprivation was unlawful. We concluded it was not.”
Begum’s lawyers had accused the Government of failing to consider the legal duties it owed her as a potential trafficking victim.
But counsel for the Home Office said security was at stake and the fact that a radicalised person may have been manipulated did not cut the risk. In 2015 Begum travelled to Syria in secret with two schoolfriends from Bethnal Green, East London.
She married an IS fighter and had three children who all died young.
Since 2019 she has been in a refugee camp in north-east Syria.
After losing her citizenship she told reporters she did not regret spending four years with IS and that the Manchester Arena terror attack was “a kind of retaliation”.
The Appeal Court ruled that then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid was within his rights to revoke her citizenship even if it made Begum effectively stateless.
In theory she could have claimed Bangladeshi status through her parents until she was 21. At the time of Javid’s 2019 decision she was 20. Begum’s solicitor, Daniel Furner, said they would fight on, hinting at a possible appeal to the supreme court.
Steve Valdez-Symonds of Amnesty International said: “The power to banish a citizen like this shouldn’t exist in the modern world, not least when we’re talking about a person seriously exploited as a child.”
This shouldn’t exist in the modern world. We’re talking of a person exploited as a child
STEVE VALDEZ-SYMONDS AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL