A woman who left the United Kingdom to join ISIS at the age of 15 has lost her Court of Appeal challenge over the decision to remove her British citizenship.
Shamima Begum flew to Syria in 2015 with two school friends to join the terror group. While there, she married an ISIS fighter and spent several years living in Raqqa.
Begum then reappeared in al-Hawl, a Syrian refugee camp, in 2019. She made international headlines as an “ISIS bride” after pleading with the UK government to be allowed to return to her home country for the birth of her son.
Then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid removed her British citizenship in February that year, and Begum’s newborn son died in a Syrian refugee camp the following month. She told UK media she had two other children prior to that baby, who also died in Syria during infancy.
Damn, that fucking sucks… but, like, refugees who didn’t voluntarily join an extremist group are definitely more worthy of asylum or other aide.
She was 15 when she was trafficked to Syria by a people smuggler who turned out to be a Canadian asset.
We have age of consent laws for a good reason.
15 year olds have underdeveloped brains and sometimes make shit decisions, that’s why we don’t legally enable them to make decisions about stuff like this. This kid got groomed.
I mean, that’s a fair argument… but she went off to join bloody isis. You don’t have to be too old to know what the hell isis is do and have done. I agree one mistake at 15 having such huge consequences is pretty bad… but it’s not like she stole her parents car and went on a joyride, she joined bloody terrorists. That’s gonna stick no matter how old you get because it’s insane. I do agree rendering her stateless is our fault and she should probably stay a citizen for that reason alone but she doesn’t deserve to move beyond the stigma of what she did even if she was very young when she did.
@emax_gomax yeah what she did was really bad, and I think she needs jail and probably the really intense rehab they do for child soldiers.
But it should be in the UK.
Many many of the kids in DRC and Sierra Leone who get groomed or kidnapped into child soldier armies have committed war crimes. The social stigma they carry afterwards is a big problem and if they don’t get proper rehab they just end up in more violence.
So I agree there are no easy answers. But the nation which produced the criminal should be the one who deals with it not dump it onto others.
As I said, it fucking sucks - but I’d rather see Syrians who were caught in the middle of a war through no action of their own prioritized. I don’t know this woman and hope she can raise her family in peace - but I’d rather focus on locals first.
@xmunk it’s not really a choice between those two things tho.
Bit of a cop out, the reality is that Syrians have to pay to clothe, feed, and securely house someone who was groomed and radicalized in Britain.
Exporting your criminals because you’d rather import worthier citizens isn’t a moral thing to do in my opinion.
It’s basically taking advantage of the fact that Syrians are in no shape to expel the radicalized Westerners who came over there to kill them.
Yeah the fact that the state can just remove citizenship is very questionable but literally no sane person should have anything to do with ISIS.
Under UK law they’re not allowed to remove citizenship if it would render the person stateless. However, when the UK was investigating whether they’d have to take her back (and they really didn’t want to), they realized that she [has? is entitled to?] Bangladeshi citizenship, something that neither she nor the Bangladeshi government was aware of. So they stripped her of her UK citizenship and said that she was now Bangladesh’s problem. Bangladesh (to put it politely) disagrees, so she remains in a Syrian camp.
She was radicalized on UK’s soil. But they want Bangladesh to deal with the consequences, based on a mere technicality? That’s disrespectful, underhanded and sly, to put it mildly.
She’s literally British. She was raised here and it’s the sole citizenship she holds. What we are doing is illegal and a shirking of our responsibilities to Syrian people, Bangladeshi people, and her. If she’s a criminal and an extremist, it’s our job to accept her back and deal with that. If she was an adolescent who made a series of terrible errors, endured the most traumatic things, and is genuinely repentant, it’s our job to accept her back and deal with that.
Yeah but since when has the UK government cared about doing illegal things. If you gave them two possible options they would automatically pick the illegal one just on principal.
For anyone reading this comment and assuming it’s facetious, may I please direct your attention to the Rwanda asylum “plan”?
The whole thing was literally thought up in a 10 minute session with Boris Johnson to try to distract from the fact that he was having parties during the time he was telling everyone else to be in lockdown, because he is and always was a brainless bellend. It was literally a plan that was never thought out and was created entirely to distract the media, and then unsurprisingly it didn’t work. For some reason Rishi then decided that he would revive it, despite the fact that it was thought up by an idiot in a panic.
As I understand it international law bans making a person stateless. Bangladeshi law says that any person born of Bangladeshi parents is automatically viewed as Bangladeshi / dual nationality until their twenty first birthday. Any time prior to that age you can apply for full or dual nationality but if you do not your Bangladeshi citizenship rights will lapse at 21. The UK’s legal argument is that as she was below this age when her UK citizenship was stripped she was not made stateless… they don’t care if Bangladesh takes her or not. They just had to prove that by revoking her UK citizenship the UK didn’t break international law.
That’s still skirting responsibility. Banking on a technicality. I’m pretty sure that this is not what the UN intended when they made such a provision. If the UK wants to disown her, they should be ready to accept responsibility for it too.
Yeah, maybe so, but regardless of my own personal view I just wanted to clear up the legal argument surrounding the case. The ethics and morality behind it is not really for the court to decide.
The reason she had her citizenship removed was because the UK government concluded that she was safe in Syria, after all she’s a member of ISIS right so what’s going to happen to her? Or at least that was the given justification.
She would have done a lot better waiting for the government to change, and then asking. Everything she has done has been mined numbingly stupid, I don’t think she’s very bright. Why the hell would you expect a massively right-wing government to be sympathetic, utter madness.
JSYK it’s “mind numbingly” not “mined numbingly”
Damn. You fuck up as a teenager from time to time. It’s just how it is. But this makes…most of my fuckups as a teen look completely harmless.
15 year old teen that got trafficked got judged as if she was a fully mature adult lmao.
Relevant Onion video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84phU8of02U
This also set a bad precedent for anyone with dual citizenship. Yes her situation was a bit…unique. but if they decided next week that being lgbtq is illegal they can start stripping citizenship from dualies and kicking them out.
I don’t know about that. That seems like a extreme slippery slope.
There is a difference where you are joining enemy combatants, ones with active military operations who are shooting at citizens of the home country.
So the only way the metaphor would be comparable is if the gay armada decides to rise up against a country.
All I have to add is that when I was fifteen I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was.
I was 15 yo too but I absolutely didn’t have the means or resources to flee a country and join another country.
That’s a LOT of micro decisions there, followed by choosing to stay for years.
I absolutely didn’t have the means or resources to flee a country and join another country.
Neither did she.
I did not know that. Thank you.
Why don’t you link the other articles of what she did in Syria herself?
Because they’re not relevant to the point I was addressing. How is that not obvious?
I have elsewhere said that she should face justice here. There has been no trial, no accounting for what she did and why, and no opportunity for the Yazedi she was complicit in enslaving to have their say about it.
The LGBTQ bit wasn’t maybe the best metaphor. But the point stands. They’ve done this, and now they can easily do it again, and with less cause.
The law in this wording was here in 1980. Previous laws that allow stripping of citizenship based on security threats have been around for 100 years. Yearly 20 people get this treatment. Yet it hasn’t been a problem, since they don’t have a PR company.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=84phU8of02U
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Is Begum stateless? I thought that the UN “Conventional relating to the status of stateless persons” forbids the removal of citizenship that renders a person stateless. She may have to return to the UK to face criminal charges due to her cooperation with a terrorist group, but I do not think the UK is allowed by the Convention to revoke her citizenship.
She had the opportunity to gain Bangladeshi citizenship until she turned 21, the UK cancelled her citizenship when she was 19 so she was supposedly not stateless at the time they cancelled it. She couldn’t get to Bangladesh in order to apply for citizenship but that is apparently not enough to reinstate her UK citizenship according to this ruling.
@profdc9 yeah, she’s definitely stateless.
Since making people stateless is a violation of international law, the UK used the claim that she could become a citizen of Bangladesh (she’s never been there but it’s her heritage).
The Bangladesh repudiated it, and since only Bangladesh can grant anyone Bangladeshi citizenship, she has no citizenship.
