In the United Kingdom, justice confirmed on Friday February 23 the loss of nationality of Shamima Begum, who joined the Islamic State (IS) organization when she was 15 years old. The Court of Appeal in London “unanimously” rejected Ms Begum, now 24,’s appeal against the 2019 decision, Judge Sue Carr said. Currently living in a camp in Syria, the young woman, whose first appeal had been rejected, cannot return to the United Kingdom.
His loss of nationality was declared by the British Home Office for reasons of national security. An “illegal” forfeiture according to his lawyer Samantha Knights, who denounced during the hearing before the court of appeal last October the “state failings” and the failure of the authorities to prevent, at the time, the departure of the teenager. For his part, Home Office lawyer James Eadie argued that “the fact that someone is radicalized, and may have been manipulated, is not inconsistent with the assessment that he constitutes a risk to national security.”
In the United Kingdom, the young woman’s case is emblematic of the delicate question of the return of the families of jihadists captured or killed in Syria and Iraq since the fall of the IS “caliphate” in 2019. Shamima Begum left London at the beginning of 2015 with two friends. Her defense presents her as the victim of trafficking set up by IS in order to marry her off. In Syria, she married a jihadist eight years her senior a few days after her arrival and had two children who died at a young age.
“Credible suspicion” of trafficking for “sexual exploitation”
After fleeing the fighting, she found herself in a Syrian camp in February 2019. While pregnant with a child who died shortly after birth, which sparked criticism against the British government, she expressed the wish to return to the United Kingdom but London stripped her of her nationality. In early 2020, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission ruled that the decision to strip her nationality did not make Shamima Begum stateless because she was Bangladeshi through her parents. But Dhaka refused to welcome him.
The latest ruling in early 2023 in this case recognized that there was a “credible suspicion” that, on the one hand, Shamima Begum had been trafficked to Syria for the purposes of “ sexual exploitation” and, on the other hand, state services were allegedly guilty of “failures” by letting her go to this country. But the court found that this “suspicion” was “insufficient” for the defense arguments to prevail.
In 2020, the young woman sparked outrage in the United Kingdom in an interview where she expressed no regrets and wore a full black veil. The following year, she begged the British government to let her return.