After she was found living in a camp in northern Syria in 2019, the British government revoked her citizenship. Begum, now 23, wants to return to Britain.
Her case has sparked a debate about whether Britain should take her back, with some Britons arguing that she poses a threat to national security and others saying she is a victim who was groomed and lured by Islamic State recruiters when she was a child.
The case also has shone a spotlight on how foreign governments repatriate or reintegrate — or do not — their citizens who joined the Islamic State but now want to return home.
More than 40,000 foreigners from some 60 countries who have been accused of having links with the Islamic State are in camps and prisons in northeastern Syria, according to Human Rights Watch. U.S. officials have urged nations to repatriate their citizens, arguing that they represent a greater threat if left in dire conditions in displacement camps.
Britain “has turned into an outlier on repatriations from northeast Syria,” Letta Tayler, a global terrorism researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in an email. “While close allies like the U.S. repatriate many of their nationals, the U.K. is content to abandon most of its nationals to indefinite, unlawful detention in hellish conditions inside a war zone.” According to Tayler, 11 British citizens have been repatriated from Syria, and at least 60 others are believed to remain in the country.
Britain’s Special Immigration Appeals Commission, a tribunal that hears challenges on decisions to revoke citizenship, held a five-day hearing in November on Begum’s appeal, which it announced Wednesday it had dismissed. She can appeal the ruling.
Begum argued that the revocation of her citizenship left her stateless and that she was a victim of trafficking.
The British government has said that Begum, who has Bangladeshi parents, is a citizen of Bangladesh. For its part, Bangladesh has said she is not a citizen and has never set foot in that country.
In recent years, Britain has significantly expanded the scope and use of its powers to revoke citizenship. A report last year by the nonprofit Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion found that, of the countries for which it was able to find data, Britain was second only to Bahrain in the number of people whose citizenship had been revoked for national security reasons.
Recently, however, Nicaragua has increasingly used the tool against political opponents. Last week, it stripped 94 people of their citizenship, and measures are underway to do the same to more than 200 others.
The British government can withdraw someone’s citizenship if it is for the “public good” and would not make the person stateless, meaning that those with dual or multiple nationalities are less secure than those who have one nationality.
Critics of Britain’s approach say it discriminates against those with immigrant backgrounds and tries to pass responsibility to the person’s “second” country or to the place of detention.
Britain’s Home Office does not regularly publish figures on citizenship revocations, but a House of Commons Library research briefing found that at least 217 people were subjected to the procedure between 2010 and 2021 for the “public good.” Some may have successfully appealed and regained citizenship, but how many is unknown.
Begum’s case has received considerable attention in Britain, and she is the subject of a BBC podcast, “I’m Not a Monster: The Shamima Begum Story,” as well as a documentary, “The Shamima Begum Story.”
Ten days after she arrived in Syria, Begum married Yago Riedijk, a Dutch convert to Islam who has been convicted of terrorism offenses. She was 15, and he was 21. They had three children, all of whom have died.
Joshua Baker, the journalist behind the podcast and documentary, interviewed Begum over a span of two years at a sprawling tent camp in northern Syria. He said that Wednesday’s ruling was expected, as it mainly dealt with whether the British government acted in a lawful way in 2019 — not whether the tribunal agreed with the arguments of Begum’s lawyers that she was a victim of child sexual exploitation.
“She will be very disappointed,” he said of Begum. “She’s desperate to come home and have her day in court, but she has very little faith in getting back to Britain.” Baker said that Begum sees the camp “as her punishment for being part of one of the most horrible things in the 21st century,” but that “her lawyers do see legal avenues to keep going.”
“When I was leaving the court today,” he added, one of her lawyers said to me, ‘This isn’t over.’”
*This story has not been edited by The Infallible staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.
