A British citizenship appeals court rejected the latest plea by Shamima Begum. She fled Britain for IS as a child.
Three judges unanimously ruled in 2015 that then-home secretary Sajid Javid could let her go from east London to Syria with two pals without child trafficking worries.
Shamima Begum, 24, became stateless as a Bangladeshi citizen until 2019 after the court endorsed Javid.
Her counsel argued that citizenship revocation breached equalities law and impacted British Muslims, but a national security exception prevented it.
“The ruling may have been harsh,” said Court of Appeal president Dame Sue Carr.
Miss Begum may have hurt herself. This court rejects both views.
Check for illegal deprivation. We denied the appeal because it wasn’t.”
Shamima Begum’s attorney, Dan Furner, requested a Supreme Court appeal. Furner assured Begum and the government they were “not going to stop fighting until she gets justice and until she is safely back home.”.
A Home Office official said, “We are pleased that the court of appeals upheld our position. Any UK security move has my support.”
This whole scenario shames ministers who would rather humiliate a minor trafficking victim than accept UK responsibilities. Representative of British women in north-east Syria, Reprieve director Maya Foa, called citizenship loss “a terrible, unsustainable policy designed to score cheap political points.”.
In 2019, Kurdish troops captured Shamima Begum early in the IS fight in Syria and Iraq and imprisoned her indefinitely at Roj refugee camp in northeast Syria.
After telling the Times and BBC that she did not regret four years in the caliphate and that the Manchester Arena terror incident was “a kind of retaliation,” Javid revoked her British citizenship as “conducive to the public.
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In September 2021, Begum told a TV interviewer she regretted her decision and would “rather die than go back to IS.” She offered a trial in the UK to prove her innocence. “The government has nothing on me,” she said.
After much debate, the Supreme Court suspended Begum’s case. She was eligible for citizenship until she was 21 because her parents were Bangladeshis, despite never visiting.
SiAC denied Begum’s request last year. The Home Office rejected Begum’s lawyers’ appeal.
Carr, Lords Justice Bean, and Whipple dismissed Begum’s attorney’s five annulment arguments.
Justices said “there was no material shortcoming” in Javid’s sexual exploitation transport assessment failure.
The then-home secretary knew “the likelihood that she was a child victim of others who wished to exploit her for sexual or extremist reasons.” He might prioritize her national security with “a question of evaluation and judgment” authorized by law.
After getting Bangladeshi citizenship, she acted legally “despite knowing that she had nowhere else to go.” Begum’s lawyer called her “de facto stateless” because she couldn’t travel to Bangladesh, but national security triumphed.
Justices found her too old to decide. “The same decision could no longer be made because [Ms. Begum] lost her Bangladeshi citizenship at 21,” they said.
The justices also rejected Begum’s attorneys’ claims that citizenship deprivation “disproportionately applied to British Muslims of certain ethnic minorities” and “impacted detrimentally upon the relations between members of Muslim communities and others.”.
National security exemptions to public sector equality allowed Javid’s behavior, the court decided.
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