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.
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”?
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.
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.
At least in my opinion, Hamas is the good guys. They are also labeled as an extremist group. So are we actually wrong to say ISIS is universally bad? I mean, both groups took power is response to foreign invaders just full on wrecking their shit constantly. Both groups employed Gorilla warfare to most effectively damage a far superior military. I’ve been recognizing more and more lately that America is almost always the bad guys in wars. So does that imply that ISIS was actually the good guys?
How do I delete someone else’s comment?
ctrl+alt+del
Yeah……you need to go outside and touch some grass. Literally everything you just said is wrong.
Damn, I really should have explicitly formulated that comment as a question asking whether my current beliefs are wrong, rather than stating incorrect opinions as a fact. Wait, hold on a second… I did do that!
lol okay bro
does that imply that ISIS was actually the good guys?
For me, it comes down to how much damage the group does to the people under it’s control. ISIS and the Taliban seem to be rather brutal and repressive to the civilians, especially women: women must wear Islamic clothes, can’t go to school for long, can’t go out alone, etc etc. Admittedly I’m less familiar with Hamas, but I just haven’t seen stories of that kind of brutality from them.
I see what you’re saying, but let’s not put ISIS and the Taliban on the same level. The Taliban are bad, but ISIS is like a Muslim Wehrmacht. There’s a reason so many Muslim (and Middle Eastern) refugees are Iraqi and Syrian.
As long as you aren’t queer, a woman, or Jewish, you’ll be fine, probably. If you are gay and they find you, you are fucked beyond a shadow of a doubt. This is what they did to a hamas commander who they suspected of being gay. Wasn’t even proven.
They said Ishtiwi told them during a family visit to the jail that he had been whipped, deprived of sleep and hung from the ceiling during his detention.
[Then shot him in the chest three times the next day, killing him]
https://www.newsweek.com/prominent-hamas-commander-was-executed-after-accusations-gay-sex-432343
At the cost of likely downvotes
women must wear Islamic clothes, can’t go to school for long, can’t go out alone, etc etc
As an outsider, this is literally what I expect America to be like in 10 years
You are kinda glossing over an awful lot of wholesale slaughter carried out on civilians. It doesn’t count as “guriella war” war when the people you are shooting are civilians, not soldiers.
The state of Israel and the IDF are undertaking a colonial, genocidal war in Palestine. That doesn’t make Hamas the good guys.
No no, man. Hamas is morally grey. ISIS is just bad. Like “gets declared kaffir by other Muslims” bad.
If Hamas is the IRA during the troubles, ISIS is the Wehrmacht.
No
ISIS and Hamas are entirely different.
If anything ISIS seems like an israeli proxy created to destabilize other countries in the region and attack their government. ISIS never attacks israel. And recently they attacked Iran instead of israel which is very questionable.
And ISIS treats their soldiers in israel… and receives money from israel…-.
Hamas is not interested in attacking other countries or expanding their Lebensraum. Hamas is very comparable with the ANC in South Africa, or the IRA in the UK. Their people were oppressed and they started asking for their rights a little less nicely.
Yuck dude
My dude, ISIS was literally burning people alive in cages. That’s not even the worst thing they’ve regularly done. They are literally evil incarnate.
Hamas is not as bad but that’s really not saying much. They still actively want to commit genocide. ANYONE who openly calls for genocide is a piece of shit in my book.
15 year old teen that got trafficked got judged as if she was a fully mature adult lmao.
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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 want 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.
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.
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.
