IS bride loses legal bid to return to UK
Court rules Begum cannot fight citizenship decision
ISLAMIC State bride Shamima Begum has been blocked by Supreme Court judges from returning to the UK to fight for her British citizenship in an emphatic victory for the Government.
Begum was a 15-year-old schoolgirl when she ran away from her east London family home to join IS terrorists in Syria in February 2015.
When she was discovered in a Syrian refugee camp in 2019, then-home secretary Sajid Javid stripped her of citizenship on national security grounds.
The Court of Appeal ruled last July that Begum should be allowed back into the UK to fight an appeal, but when the legal battle reached the Supreme Court the Government argued Begum’s return would increase the risk of a terrorist attack on British soil.
Delivering a ruling this morning that Begum cannot return to the UK to challenge Mr Javid’s decision, Lord Reed said the Court of Appeal had made errors in its decision.
“(The Court of Appeal) made its own assessment of the requirements of national security and preferred it to that of the home secretary,” he said.
“This was despite the absence of any relevant evidence before it or any relevant findings of fact from the court below. It didn’t give the home secretary’s assessment the respect it should have received.”
The ruling is an emphatic victory for the Government in the Begum case, vidicating its decision to strip her of citizenship and fight hard to maintain that position.
Begum, who is currently in the al-Roj refugee camp in northern Syria under the watch of armed guards, was one of three pupils from Bethnal Green Academy who flew from Gatwick Airport to Istanbul on February 17, 2015, before making their way to Raqqa in Syria.
Embedded with the Islamic State, she married jihadi fighter Yago Riedijk within 10 days of arriving in Syria and had two children – both of whom have since died.
Begum was heavily pregnant with her third child when, in February 2019, she was interviewed in a Syrian refugee camp by a journalist for The Times, expressing a wish to return to the UK.
Mr Javid welcomed the court’s ruling, saying: “There are no simple solutions to this situation, but any restrictions of rights and freedoms faced by this individual are a direct consequence of the extreme actions that she and others have taken.”