Shamima Begum betrayed Britain and she should face charges of high treason
Shamima Begum is an unlovely creature: dim, cruel and selfpitying. We should be sparing in our use of the word “evil”, but it is hard to think of how else to describe someone who, watching videos of Islamic State militants beheading civilians, felt a tug of attraction.
The jihadists’ atrocities were well-documented when the then 15-year-old Begum left Bethnal Green to join them. She must have known that they raped and enslaved nonMuslim women, that they executed aid workers, that they tortured children.
Britain cheered when Sajid Javid, then the home secretary, rescinded Begum’s British citizenship, and there was widespread anger this week at the Supreme Court’s ruling that she be allowed to return to contest that decision.
That anger is based on older and more visceral things than due process. Here, it seems to most people, is someone who has declared war on her country – someone who has spurned it in the most hostile way imaginable, crossing continents to take up arms against the West.
Even now Begum shows no remorse. The jihadi bride, who reportedly sewed suicide bombers into their vests, says she was unfazed by images of torture and decapitation. She even justified the Manchester Arena abomination, in which girls who were younger than she was when she left Bethnal Green were shredded by shrapnel. There is something peculiarly ugly about the sight of someone who evidently loathes Britain none the less whining to be allowed back in.
Public opinion might not be too fussed about legal niceties but, as a matter of fact, the Supreme Court’s decision is questionable. The Home Secretary has the legal power to revoke someone’s citizenship on national security grounds.
In affirming that power, Parliament did not make it conditional on the malefactor being allowed to appeal in Britain; indeed, the rules seem specifically to anticipate cases like this one. Our courts have a long history of overturning deportation orders, often in plain defiance of the statutes and always from the same political direction. This ruling may be seen, in a sense, as the latest in a varied series.
Yet a troubling question remains. What is the correct way to deal with British citizens who travel abroad to attack our allies and our interests – who, in plainer language, betray us?
Had Begum been pulverised in a bombing raid, as happened to several British-born extremists, few would have shed tears. But that is not an option once the shooting has stopped.
In any case, what are we to do with those who, unlike Begum, have only British nationality, and whom we are not allowed, under various international codes, to render stateless?
Ideally, they would be tried under Syrian law for the barbarities they committed under that country’s jurisdiction. Syria, though, is not a functioning state. The Kurdish militias who hold the radicals would cheerfully bump them off for us; but we are not the kind of country that sanctions the execution of prisoners.
We might have established a detention centre under international supervision and tried its inmates in
situ but, for various reasons, that proved too complicated. And so, by a process of elimination, we are left only with the option of trying them here.
Trying them for what, though? Simply violating a ban on travelling to Syria? Surely joining a group engaged in a terrorist campaign against us warrants an altogether stiffer charge than that.
High treason ceased to be a capital offence in 1998, but the penalty remains life imprisonment. That seems an appropriate recompense for those who have spat upon everything their country stands for. Let them come here; and let that be the last journey they make.