Begum loses first stage of appeal over citizenship
Tribunal rules ‘Isil bride’ could be stripped of her nationality without rendering her stateless
SHAMIMA BEGUM, the “Isil bride”, is hoping to be granted additional legal aid funding to take the Government to the Court of Appeal after failing to get her British citizenship reinstated.
The former Bethnal Green schoolgirl, now 20, left the UK when she was 15 to live under the rule of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) in Syria, where she married a Dutch fighter and had three children.
Last year, she was found heavily pregnant and mourning the death of her two eldest children in a refugee camp during the fall of the so-called Caliphate.
Sajid Javid, the then home secretary, stripped Ms Begum of her citizenship after she expressed little remorse for her extremist past – a move her lawyers claimed left her unlawfully stateless.
Yesterday, Ms Begum – who continues to be held in the al-roj camp – failed in the first stage of her legal battle against the decision.
The Special Immigration Appeals Commission, a tribunal that hears national security cases, found Ms Begum was not rendered stateless as she had a right to Bangladeshi citizenship.
A panel claimed her plight in the conflict-shattered region was “a result of her own choices”, as it also rejected claims that Mr Javid’s decision unlawfully exposed her to human rights violations and left her unable to mount an effective appeal.
Following yesterday’s ruling, Ms Begum’s solicitor, Daniel Furner of Birnberg Peirce, said his client “will immediately initiate an appeal”.
It sets the stage for a potentially lengthy series of battles through the
Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, for which Ms Begum is expected to receive taxpayer-funded legal aid.
This could potentially involve a challenge against three different sets of proceedings: the citizenship decision, the refusal by the Government to grant her a visa, and a separate judicial review into the visa decision.
In a separate judgment, the High Court rejected Ms Begum’s challenge to the Home Office’s decision to refuse to allow her to enter the UK to pursue her appeal effectively.
But there are fears it could take up to a year for any of these proceedings to come before the Court of Appeal, with either party likely to contest the outcome subsequently in the Supreme Court.
Ms Begum was first granted financial assistance to appeal against Mr Javid’s decision last year, after her family applied to the Legal Aid Agency. It is understood she will now seek to persuade the agency to extend funding to cover the Court of Appeal proceedings.
There could be further hearings still as Ms Begum exhausts all avenues of appeal. The legal saga, which will also require the Government to pay for lawyers to fight the case, could end up costing taxpayers tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of pounds.
Mr Furner said yesterday’s ruling would be “hard to explain” to Ms Begum, who lost her third child shortly after arriving in the camp. He claimed the dangers facing his client “have increased” in Syria, leaving her chance of survival “even more precariously balanced than before”.