Any British person who has a foreign-born parent will feel their status is more precarious after the court of appeal decision
The court of appeal ruled this morning that Shamima Begum had been lawfully deprived of her British citizenship. The 24-year-old’s citizenship was first revoked in 2019. She challenged that decision at a special immigration appeals commission last year, and lost. This latest ruling might represent the end of her hope to return home, although given the young woman’s circumstances – all three of her children have died, she lives in a refugee camp they call the “mini caliphate”, and is thought of only periodically by her countrymen in order to be pilloried then forgotten again – it would be foolish to try to guess at her levels of resilience or despair.
The judges were careful to stress that the ruling didn’t represent any comment on the sympathy or otherwise it was reasonable to have for Begum – rather, that there was nothing unlawful in Sajid Javid’s deprivation decision. The ruling hadn’t failed to take into account that Begum had been groomed and trafficked, which would have put it in breach of the UK’s anti-slavery protections, and was the contention of her appeal.
It’s hard to conceive of what grooming and trafficking mean, if not what happened to Begum, painstakingly documented by Josh Baker in his podcast documentary last year, Shamima Begum – Return from Isis. She left the UK aged 15, and her lawyers highlighted numerous failings of the state – Begum’s school, the Met police, Tower Hamlets council – that even allowed her to get as far as Turkey. Her entry into Syria was reportedly partly facilitated by an informant for Canadian intelligence, so the state failings go beyond even our own.
Because it was based on the possibility of her getting citizenship elsewhere. In Begum’s case, she was technically eligible for Bangladeshi citizenship at the time of the ruling, although that is no longer true, and was not true in any meaningful way at the time of the decision.
Every Jewish person is technically eligible for Israeli citizenship. And that could be used to deprive them of British citizenship, with this ruling as precedent.
Also, it wasn’t based on the possibility of her getting citizenship elsewhere. She got hit by both rules allowing the removal of citizenship. Both on security grounds, and on the “citizen of other country” one. Even if she doesn’t have a different citizenship, she can be deprived of it because she is a threat.