Shamima Begum: what next after ‘Isis bride’ loses bid to regain UK citizenship?

Shamima Begum has lost an appeal against the decision to remove her British citizenship despite a "credible" case that she was trafficked.

The ruling by the special immigration appeals commission means the 23-year-old remains unable to return to the UK and remains stuck in a camp in northern Syria.

Justice Jay told the semi-secret court reviewing her case that her appeal had been fully dismissed.

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The judgement showed Begum had won the argument but lost the legal battle, her lawyers claimed.

They said the case was “nowhere near over” and bemoaned a “lost opportunity” to reverse a “profound mistake and a continuing injustice,” pledging to urgently pursue “every possible avenue to challenge this decision.”

Supporters of the former London schoolgirl – who ran away in 2015 and married an Islamic State fighter in Syria – maintain that she was “not a terrorist but rather a victim, groomed by IS recruiters with flawed motivations”, reported The Guardian’s security editor Dan Sabbagh.

‘A victim not a terrorist’

During the case, the court heard Begum was a victim of human trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation. She was a “British child aged 15 who was persuaded by a determined and effective Isis propaganda machine to follow a pre-existing route and provide a marriage for an Isis fighter”, said her barrister, Samantha Knights KC.

After the appeal concluded, one of Begum’s lawyers, Gareth Peirce said the implications of the judgement were that “no British child who is being trafficked outside the UK will be protected by the British state if the home secretary invokes national security.”

“Reading the factual underpinning of what the commission considers to being made out, you will feel that there will be no way that she could not have succeeded in her appeal,” Peirce added.

Throughout the case, Begum and her backers argued that “as the child victim of people traffickers, she should be protected by the government, not persecuted”, said Sky News’s crime correspondent Martin Brunt.

This defence was based on claims that Begum was smuggled into Syria by a Canadian spy. In a book released in early September, Richard Kerbaj, a former security correspondent at The Sunday Times, wrote that the then schoolgirl and two of her friends were trafficked into Syria by a smuggler who was working as a double agent for IS and Canadian intelligence.

Kerbaj claimed that the spy’s role was covered up by police and the UK government.

The trafficking claims made for “alarming reading”, said Minister for Development Andrew Mitchell, who co-chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Trafficked Britons in Syria. In an article for The Telegraph, Mitchell agreed that the “so-called Isis bride” was a “child victim of trafficking, not an international terrorist”, and argued that bringing her to the UK was “morally the right thing to do”.

Leaving Begum there “isn’t just morally repugnant”, said James Brownsell on Middle East Eye, it also “makes no sense even from a security perspective”.

Many, however, felt the correct judgement had been made. Speaking to Sky News ahead of PMQs yesterday, Conservative MP Gary Sambrook said the decision showed the government was doing what was “necessary to protect the UK”.

“The court has proven the government right,” he added.

‘Saturated in bulls**t’

The “national conversation” on Begum is “saturated in bulls**t”, said Simon Cottee, a senior lecturer in criminology at Kent University, on UnHerd. “Far from being trafficked to Syria against her will”, Cottee wrote, Begum “wanted to go there because she felt it was a divine duty to join Isis and help build the nascent caliphate”.

The victim is “the most celebrated identity of our era”, said Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator following the Supreme Court decision last year. By depicting her “as a tragic scapegoat, as a hapless casualty of Britain’s racist bureaucracy”, her supporters “downplay her conscious decision to join what at the time was the most barbaric movement on Earth”.

Lawyers for the Home Office argued during the trial that in “multiple press interviews” before her citizenship was revoked, Begum expressed “no remorse and said she did not regret” joining IS. She only fled for “safety and not because of a genuine disengagement from the group”, the court heard.

An assessment by MI5 found that people who had travelled to areas controlled by IS “will have been radicalised and exposed” to the Islamists’ “extremism and violence” and “will present a national security threat to the UK” if they return.

Yet what is really going on here is a “failure to take responsibility”, said Maya Foa the director of human rights charity Reprieve in The Guardian.

Considering that last year a cross-party group of MPs and peers concluded that IS was able to recruit people from the UK due to the systematic failings of UK institutions, this case simply shows that the British government “is more concerned with headlines than British lives,” Foa added.

“Each time one of our allies brings its nationals home, it shows up the UK government’s policy for what it really is,” Foa concluded: “a political posture.”