The Daily Express commissioned the below opinion piece from Reprieve, following the report published by the Independent Commission on UK Counter-Terrorism Law, Policy and Practice, which recommended that all British nationals be repatriated. The article as published (with Express headline) is below. Including in full here as this is content we supplied.
Shamima Begum needs to return to the UK – it’s Keir Starmer’s problem
By Maya Foa – Executive Director of human rights charity Reprieve
The Prime Minister has said that when deciding whether to repatriate British nationals from North East Syrian prison camps “the driving principle, the number one question will be, what’s in our national security interests?” If only this were true.
Because is it abundantly clear: for Britain’s security, and the world’s, by far the safest thing to do is bring them home. Leaving these British families in dangerous detention camps on the brink of collapse, in an unstable region where ISIS is plotting a comeback, is a much greater risk.
Don’t believe me? Admiral Brad Cooper, who commands US forces in the Middle East, recently visited the camps and urged nations to repatriate their citizens, saying this would be “a decisive blow against ISIS’s ability to regenerate”. Britain’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, agrees. So do Lord Alf Dubs and Jacob Rees-Mogg, from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Nigel Farage apparently thinks so, too.
Earlier this month, the Independent Commission on UK Counterterrorism joined this consensus, warning that the camps risk becoming “Britain’s Guantánamo” and calling on the Government to “appoint a special envoy to oversee repatriation and inform returnees of the likelihood of prosecution.”
Stripping British people of their citizenship and abandoning them in the desert was always a weak, short-term solution. It kicked the can down the road – something all governments love doing. Rather than deal with tricky questions of who to prosecute, which of the women were trafficked, how to rehabilitate them, and so on, the government simply took away all the rights that come with a British passport and declared them someone else’s problem.
This abdication of responsibility was unsustainable from the start – and now the can can’t be kicked any further. Syria’s new government, under former Hayat Tahrir al-Sham leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, has signed a deal with the Kurdish-controlled Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that will eventually see it take charge of the detention facilities. And although frequent clashes between the two underscore the volatility of the situation, both sides agree that the camps must be closed.
In the first weeks of Donald Trump’s administration, a US Aid freeze offered a reminder of how utterly dependent these open air prisons are on American funding. Trump is backing al-Sharaa, but he has made clear that there is no blank cheque. Meanwhile, SDF officials are warning that the threat of an Islamic State resurgence is greater than ever, and that the camps are an enticing target.
Whatever you think of Shamima Begum – and if you have a daughter, ask yourself whether you’d cast her out forever if she made a stupid mistake when she was 15 years old – she is British, and only British. What to do about her and the other Britons detained in North East Syria is Britain’s problem – or to be more precise, Sir Keir Starmer’s problem.
The simple solution is to bring them home and prosecute the adults where there are cases to answer. British courts are vastly experienced in bringing terrorism prosecutions. As former Director of Public Prosecutions Lord Ken McDonald told a parliamentary enquiry: “We have a justice system that is generally reckoned to be as robust as any in the world… I think we should set our justice system loose on some of these individuals.”
Our allies have demonstrated over and over again that it can be done. The US, Germany, Australia, France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Canada and many other countries have repatriated large numbers of their nationals.
The previous Conservative government may have created this situation, by burying its head in the sand rather than face up to its responsibilities, but now it is up to this Labour government to deal with it. For the sake of British and global security, these British families must be repatriated, and the detention camps shut down.