Shamima Begum’s legal team has vowed to continue to fight for her return to Britain after she lost her legal challenge over the stripping of her citizenship.
The Court of Appeal has ruled that the government acted lawfully to protect national security after Begum became an Islamic State bride.
Begum, now 24, was 15 when she and two friends from Bethnal Green, east London, travelled to Syria and joined Islamic State. She has been in a Kurdish-run refugee camp in northeast Syria since the fall of the caliphate.
After the ruling on Friday Daniel Furner, Begum’s solicitor, said her legal team was “not going to stop fighting until she does get justice and until she is safely back home”.
She may still appeal to the Supreme Court, but her prospects of success appear bleak given that the three appeal court judges’ rejection of all Begum’s grounds of appeal was unanimous. These grounds included that British officials failed to properly consider whether she was a victim of trafficking, and that the stripping of her citizenship left her stateless.
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Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill, the lady chief justice, said: “It could be argued the decision in Ms Begum’s case was harsh. It could also be argued that Ms Begum is the author of her own misfortune. But it is not for this court to agree or disagree with either point of view. Our only task is to assess whether the deprivation decision was unlawful. We have concluded it was not, and the appeal is dismissed.”
The Special Immigration Appeals Commission had previously concluded that even though there was a “credible suspicion” that Begum was trafficked for sexual exploitation, it did not mean she had an “absolute entitlement” to citizenship.
The government has argued that Begum was aware of the brutality of the terrorist regime, knew what she was doing and posed a threat to national security.
In 2019 Sajid Javid, then home secretary, took advice from intelligence services before he stripped Begum of citizenship, after she was found by The Times at a refugee camp.
• Read Anthony Loyd’s report from 2019: ‘Bring me home, says Bethnal Green girl who left to join Isis’
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Carr said in the 42-page judgment: “Ms Begum may well have been influenced and manipulated by others, but still have made a calculated decision to travel to Syria and align with Isil. The assessment of the national security risk was a question of evaluation and judgment entrusted by parliament to the secretary of state.”
The Home Office and Downing Street welcomed the ruling. The former said: “Our priority remains maintaining the safety and security of the UK and we will robustly defend any decision made in doing so.” No 10 added: “We never take decisions around deprivation [of citizenship] lightly.”
Charities estimate that Begum and about 25 other British families are still living in squalid conditions in Camp Roj and al-Hol. There are concerns that the camps are breeding grounds for the next generation of terrorists. Britain is the last western country to block the return of Isis families, with American officials previously warning that the stance harms global efforts to fight terrorism.
David Davis, a Tory MP and civil liberties campaigner, said: “Despite today’s judgment, the government cannot continue to shirk its obligations on this issue. Shamima Begum is British, and should be repatriated along with all our other nationals detained without charge or trial in northeast Syria, to face British justice, where appropriate.
“Our international allies recognised this as the only sensible solution long ago — the government must finally take responsibility and abandon its failed policy.”
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Maya Foa, director of Reprieve, a human rights NGO, said: “Stripping citizenship in bulk and abandoning British families in desert prisons is a terrible, unsustainable policy designed to score cheap political points. Rather than demonise Shamima Begum, ministers should reckon with the institutional failures that enabled Isis to traffic vulnerable British women and girls.”
Begum said she had “no regrets” when she was discovered in 2019, as the Islamic State’s self-styled caliphate was collapsing. She has since expressed contrition.
Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana, the two friends from the Bethnal Green Academy with whom Begum went to Syria, are both believed to be dead.
Abase married an 18-year-old Australian Islamic State fighter known as the “Ginger Jihadi” because of his hair colour. She initially kept in contact with her mother but these messages have since stopped. Her mother has told the press that she believes her daughter has died.
Sultana also stayed in contact with family through phone calls but she is believed to have died in a Russian air strike in 2016, though this has never been independently confirmed.
