This op-ed by Reprieve’s joint executive director Maya Foa appeared in The Guardian on 08/08/2024.
The supreme court’s refusal on Wednesday to hear Shamima Begum’s appeal against the removal of her UK citizenship will be a crushing disappointment, but it is unlikely to have come as a shock.
British courts have acknowledged that she is in all likelihood a child trafficking victim, groomed by Islamic State for sexual exploitation, and that stripping her of her British citizenship leaves her effectively stateless; but that the law as it stands allows a home secretary to remove all the rights that come with a UK passport from someone such as Begum, possibly without notice, and certainly without due process. Yesterday, three justices at Britain’s highest court agreed.
This is an absurdity, as well as a terrifying lesson in almost unlimited executive power. If Begum has committed a crime, Britain’s justice system is more than capable of putting her on trial and securing a conviction. The idea that this young woman poses so great a security risk that British courts vastly experienced in terrorist prosecutions cannot handle her is ludicrous.
For the last five years, since fleeing the collapse of IS, heavily pregnant and grieving the loss of two young children, Begum’s home has been a prison camp run by Kurdish authorities in north-east Syria. The neighbouring detention facility, al-Hawl, has been described by the UN secretary general, António Guterres, as “the worst camp that exists in today’s world”.
Camp Roj, where most of the remaining handful of British families are imprisoned, is only marginally better. Women and children are at constant risk of violence, sickened by pollution from nearby oil wells, and terrorised by Turkish airstrikes landing nearby. They live in flimsy tents that are freezing in winter (heated by oil stoves that often catch fire and kill children) and boiling hot in the summer. This week, the average daily temperature in nearby Qamishli is 43C (109F).
Healthcare is barely more than first aid, education almost nonexistent. Phones are banned and women caught with one are severely punished. Recently, at the height of summer, Roj was without water for several days. There has been no electricity since January. Many of the children are malnourished, others severely traumatised, having known nothing but captivity.
Each time I visit, I am staggered that the UK government would abandon its nationals in this Guantánamo-in-the-desert. Without a change in policy, it is a matter of time before a British woman or child dies here. Transfer to Syria or Iraq would likely mean torture, disappearance or death. Remember that none of the women have been charged with a crime. The children, of course, are blameless.
Although Begum’s lawyers have said they “will take every possible legal step including to petition the European court of human rights,” it has long been clear that this is a political problem that necessitates a political solution.
Stripping Begum of her citizenship only ever made sense as a political move: a populist play for favourable tabloid headlines. It was announced in February 2019 by then home secretary Sajid Javid, with a bully’s swagger, on the day the second of two fateful interviews with Shamima was broadcast on the BBC and her status as the woman the Daily Mail comments section loves to hate was confirmed.
Media interviews with this terrified, brainwashed teenager are the closest thing to a “trial” she has ever been granted. She was convicted in the court of public opinion, and sentenced by politicians to exile without charge or trial.
Whatever our own personal opinions may be about Begum, this treatment must surely be unacceptable in a country that believes in the rule of law.
If there is evidence that she has committed crimes then it is perfectly possible for her to be tried in a British court. Former director of public prosecutions Lord Ken MacDonald told MPs and peers that “hundreds and hundreds of terrorist prosecutions” have passed successfully through British courts in recent years. The independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall, has called for the UK to repatriate its nationals and put them on trial, where appropriate.
The previous UK government’s policy has demonstrably failed. All of our main security allies are repatriating their nationals – and growing ever more frustrated with Britain’s failure to do so.
In May, the US repatriated 11 of its citizens, and facilitated the return home of Canadian, Dutch and Finnish nationals in the same operation. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, remarked, not for the first time, that “the only durable solution to the humanitarian and security crisis in the displaced persons camps and detention facilities in northeast Syria is for countries to repatriate, rehabilitate, reintegrate, and where appropriate, ensure accountability for wrongdoing.”
The new Labour government should take this advice on board, reject the Conservative government’s cruel, politically motivated policy, and look again at Shamima Begum and other Britons imprisoned in north-east Syria. Abandoning them merely erodes our moral decency, and makes all of us less safe.
