At last! A Supreme Court ruling that the British can cheer
Shamima Begum was said to be “very angry, upset and crying” after five Supreme Court judges unanimously turned down the Islamic State bride’s request to return to the UK to fight a decision to strip her of her British citizenship. Many of us will have had a rather different reaction. Like the 78 per cent of Britons who told pollsters it was right of Sajid Javid to remove the then 19-year-old’s citizenship in 2019.
Begum’s supporters accuse the rest of us of lacking compassion for the young woman, who was only 15 when she left Bethnal Green with two school friends to travel to Raqqa and get married to an Isil fighter. Personally, I prefer to reserve my compassion for Yazidi girls who were captured by Isil and used as sex slaves. One young woman, aged 24, was found severely malnourished, covered in cigarette burns and razor cuts, barely able to speak. Her family only discovered her whereabouts when they spotted her for sale on the dark web.
Yazidis who did manage to escape said they were often washed and prepared for rape by jihadi wives like Shamima Begum. The cruelty those poor creatures were subject to is enough to melt any decent mind.
Yet human rights activists in the UK like to focus on the ordeal of Begum, now 21, who is stuck in the al-roj refugee camp in northern Syria. Why not bring her back, they argue, so she can face British justice in “a fair trial”?
What justice would that be exactly? I strongly suspect that one reason so many don’t want Begum to return is because we have pretty much given up on the idea of courts protecting innocent people against those who hate them and their way of life.
They know that, at best, Begum would be given a slap on the wrist by a we-feel-your-pain, Left-leaning judiciary. Thereafter, she would enjoy a career as a celebrity commentator, feted for speaking out on the institutionalised racism of the dreadful country she fought tooth and nail to return to. If there was a chance of Begum being prosecuted for treason or as an accessory to crimes against humanity, then we might be willing to be merciful. There isn’t.
The sorry statistics speak for themselves. The last figures disclosed by the Home Office revealed that of more than 400 British foreign fighters who were known to have travelled to Syria and returned home since 2012, only 54 had been convicted of an offence. Hundreds more are believed to have gone off the radar and are highly dangerous. Prosecutions are difficult because
evidence is in such short supply. Witnesses are hard to come by because the dead can’t testify. Too many in Raqqa – like that head in a bin which Begum said she wasn’t fazed by – did not live to tell the awful tale.
An activist from an anti-isil collective claimed that members of his group say Begum, who insisted she was only a housewife during Raqqa’s reign of terror, was a member of the hated “hisba”. The Isil morality police enforced a strict interpretation of Islamic law, meting out punishment to those who failed to behave or dress correctly. According to one account, Begum was seen in Syria carrying an automatic weapon and shouting at Syrian women for wearing brightly coloured shoes.
It’s easy to say Begum should be tried in the country where she was born, but the chances of such testimony meeting British standards of evidence is remote, not least because the Human Rights Act prevents us from dealing adequately with terrorists and their supporters here in the UK. Lawyers tried to use the HRA to nullify the removal of her citizenship, thus allowing her to return. At which point it would be almost impossible to deport her.
In such a warped climate, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn an earlier ruling by the Court of Appeal counts as a pleasant surprise, as well as a victory for common sense. The higher court deemed national security to be more important than the rights of a potentially dangerous terrorist supporter. Good. It’s high time that the state protected its citizens against the consequences of so-called liberal values, which play so foolishly into the hands of our enemies. (France, we should note, refuses to take back any jihadists, only making an exception for their children.)
Well done, Priti Patel, for taking a stand. “The Supreme Court has reaffirmed the Home Secretary’s authority to make vital national security decisions,” she said.
The British are a fair people, but we don’t like being taken for fools. Are we really to be rebuked for a failure to show compassion to people like Shamima Begum who willingly served one of the cruellest ideologies in human history?
She was a party to war crimes, she gave comfort to those who seek to destroy us. When we underestimate the threat, as we did with the Manchester Arena bomber, Salman Abedi, too often innocent men, women and children pay with their blood for our naivety.
When she left to join Isil, Begum betrayed the Britain whose decency and sense of fair play she now relies upon to rescue her.
Let that be a lesson to anyone who takes our country for granted. It’s rare that we can say this, but those judges did the right thing.
‘Begum betrayed the very country whose decency she now depends on for her rescue’