Judges will give their decision on Wednesday whether the removal of British citizenship from Shamima Begum, who left the UK as a 15-year-old schoolgirl to join Islamic State (IS), was lawful.
Begum left her home in east London in 2015 with two school friends to travel to Syria, marrying the Dutch national Yago Riedijk, 27, shortly after. She was found in a refugee camp in 2019, stripped of her British citizenship and banned from entering Britain. She has been fighting to return to the UK ever since.
Wednesday’s decision by the special immigration appeals commission will not determine whether Begum can come back to the UK – several British women detained in north-east Syria retain British citizenship but have not been repatriated – but will nevertheless be closely watched.
Begum’s case has attracted widespread publicity. The then home secretary, Sajid Javid, was accused by the former director of public prosecutions of England and Wales, Lord Macdonald, among others, of revoking her citizenship to bolster his ambitions to be prime minister.
The case has highlighted how Britain is out of step with its allies on the issue of citizenship, being the only country frequently to remove it, apart from Bahrain. A report last year found that 464 people had been stripped of British citizenship since rules were relaxed in 2006. Begum’s plight has drawn attention to this, as did the Nationality and Borders Act, passed last year, which relaxed the rules to allow people’s citizenship to be removed without notice under specified circumstances.
Most of Britain’s allies have repatriated their nationals from north-east Syria, including the US and other European countries. Last month, Spain became the latest country to start repatriating families of IS fighters from Syrian refugee camps, with two Spanish women and 13 Spanish children arriving at Torrejón military airbase near Madrid.
Begum has described the conditions at al-Roj, where she is being held, as “worse than prison” because there is no limit to the length of her detention. Her baby son Jarrah died – her third child to do so – in March 2019 in another Syrian refugee camp, al-Hawl, shortly after Javid informed her family that her British citizenship was being revoked.
A book published last year by the journalist Richard Kerbaj alleged that Begum and her two friends, who were both killed, were taken into Syria by a Syrian man who was leaking information to the Canadian security services.
During the immigration appeals commission hearing in November, Begum’s lawyers said she was “recruited, transported, transferred, harboured and received in Syria for the purposes of sexual exploitation and marriage to an adult male” and police should have investigated when she joined IS.
But James Eadie KC, for the Home Office, told the commission the threat posed to national security was the most important factor, even if what Begum had been through was “ghastly, unacceptable”.
Whatever the judges’ decision, it is unlikely to end the debate. Begum, who is currently the subject of a 10-part BBC podcast, remains the most high-profile example of the UK’s approach towards its citizens in Syrian refugee camps. Critics of that approach include the US, some security experts and senior Conservatives.
