Though judges agreed
Shamima Begum presented a believable case she was a victim of ISIS sex trafficking, a British court dismissed her appeal to get her UK citizenship back, barring the 23-year-old from returning home. The
BBC quoted Begum's legal reps as stating her case is "nowhere near over," but for now she remains stateless in a refugee camp in northern Syria. Begum and a pair of friends left the UK in 2015, when she was 15 years old, in a bid to join ISIS. She later rose to notoriety in 2019 when she surfaced in a Syrian camp and asked the British government to let her come home to give birth, with international media calling her an "
ISIS bride". Britain’s home secretary instead stripped her of her UK citizenship; she
lost the baby and told the media it was her third child to die in the camp.
The Guardian quotes from the ruling denying Begum's appeal: that while the three-judge panel found it believable that Begum "was recruited, transferred and then [harbored] for the purpose of sexual exploitation," they did not believe that was strong enough grounds to overturn the home secretary's lawful decision to revoke her citizenship based on national security concerns. "Reasonable people will profoundly disagree with" the home secretary's decision, per the judgment, "but that raises wider societal and political questions which it is not the role of this commission to address."
Steve Valdez-Symonds, Amnesty International's refugee and migrant rights director for the UK, said in statement that the "power to banish a citizen like this simply shouldn’t exist in the modern world, not least when we’re talking about a person who was seriously exploited as a child." Begum's attorneys said the verdict was a "lost opportunity to put into reverse a profound mistake and a continuing injustice," according to CNN. They told the BBC that "every possible avenue to challenge this decision will be urgently pursued," but gave no further details. (More Shamima Begum stories.)
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