Shamima Begum
The Supreme court have ruled that she cannot return to the UK to fight her case.
If she did manage to make her way to the UK and her case was heard, she couldn't be deported anyway because there would be nowhere to deport her to.
Gordon Brown suggests that the case be heard in the camp where she lives. It needs to be resolved one way or the other
If she did manage to make her way to the UK and her case was heard, she couldn't be deported anyway because there would be nowhere to deport her to.
Gordon Brown suggests that the case be heard in the camp where she lives. It needs to be resolved one way or the other
Comments
Yes. She left the UK aged 15 to join the "Islamic State", married and had children. She is an avowed terrorist and has continuously espoused the Islamic State ideology ever since. Her children all died (basically of being small children in refugee camps and Daesh-run territory), but her husband, a Dutch man, I thought was still living.
The UK government contends that it can strip her UK citizenship because she's entitled to citizenship of Bangladesh; the Bangladeshis say that she may have a claim on Bangladeshi citizenship but it's not automatic, and she doesn't currently have Bangaldeshi citizenship. In other words, "don't fob her off on us - we don't want her".
She probably doesn't have a claim on Dutch citizenship via her husband, because her "marriage", which took place when she was 15, is probably not recognized.
Not declaring judgment on her, just trying to sort out details.
Just how would that be done?
Yeah that sounds kinda Big Brotherish.
When she and her two companions went missing it was the school that reported her missing, not her parents which opens up a can of worms.
De-radicalisation? There is depressing evidence that this is very difficult, and that the younger the person when they became radicalised the less likely that any attempt at (effectively) re-education works.
The term 'ISIS brides' used of Shamima Begum and other teens is itself misleading and problematic. What I'd like to know more about is the process by which young girls were trafficked to Syria after being groomed online by ISIS. They didn't go over to fight, they weren't joining to be trained for combat. If an impressionable teen is targeted by an organisation and groomed for marriage to a warrior fighting a noble cause, I don't know we can say she chose to leave Britain of her own volition. She is separated from her Dutch husband (apparently in another Syrian camp) and the marriage would not be recognised under Dutch law because she was underage as a child bride who was married within 10 days of arriving in Syria.
She has lost three children in appalling conditions, including her three-week-old infant son. Shamima's mother has pleaded with British authorities to allow her daughter to return. Shamima hasn't come across as a sympathetic 'victim' in the media, at 19 she made comments in support of ISIS beheadings. Parallels have been made with Patty Hearst's indoctrination by the Symbionese Liberation Army and the 'brainwashing' of religious cults, that those who leave cults can take years to let go of damaging beliefs and arguments. At the same time, the precedent set here is a troubling one.
I've been a visitor to refugee camps in southern Africa, mostly dangerous, desperate places that are hell for women and children. Shamima Begum is now trapped in a Kurdish camp in north-east Syria that is more of an unstable makeshift detention camp rather than a UN-monitored refugee settlement. In all likelihood, she will be sent as a stateless person to Iraq or to Syria if she is still alive when the camp collapses. She may not have the resources needed to bring her case on appeal before the European Court of Human Rights. Is she still a threat to British security?
The young young woman was home in time for Shabbat and whole thing was out of the headlines in less than a week.
Governments just have to want to do it.
They should be hanging their heads in shame over Nazanin Zaghari-Radcliffe too!
If you are a citizen it's not a question of what you've said or done. (Or not). "I am a British citizen" is all that needs to be considered.
All the rest is diplomatic games.
We don’t strip our own serial killers of citizenship, and we got rid of exile as a lawful punishment some centuries ago. If dual citizenship is really citizenship, it should not be possible for the government to remove it - saying some other country might give her citizenship is irrelevant.
There has always been a problem with our understanding of nonstate militias and mercenaries. We were apparently at war enough with ISIS to bomb them, rather than use a criminal justice process which is what we use for politically motivated violence, but not enough to give them the rights of prisoners of war.
So either we think she committed a crime, in which case she should be extradited to the U.K. and tried for it or we think she is a combatant on the losing side of a war - in which case she should be returned to her country because the war is over - which means she should be returned to the U.K.
Also what the fuck do we believe her British children did ? At least one was left to die in a refugee camp with no consular assistance - for what reason exactly ? I do not believe the assertion the U.K. could not reach them when a coterie of journalists have managed it.
Restore her UK citizenship, bring her home and put her on trial for any crimes she may have committed under UK law (and, what exactly would those be if she didn't take up arms against anyone, much less UK citizens?) IMO she's very much a victim of Da'esh, having been conned by their propaganda, groomed and brainwashed and should be treated as such. Would we be condemning her and her friends if they'd been snatched from the street and taken to Syria against their will? The lies and grooming they fell for such that they made their own way there are functionally the same. Those who groomed them, and assisted them in getting to Syria, are the greater criminals and should be the ones hounded down by the legal authorities - if she's to appear in a court she should be in the witness box against those who abused her.
As for Nazanin Zaghari-Radcliffe, we can now give the Iranians what they want, a seat at the table, so they can reciprocate.
There was a time when children had adult responsibility attributed to them at 8 or 12. There's a tendency in some circles now to argue that they should be let off all responsibility for anything until they are, say, 18, at which point they become instantly fully adult. Come what may, adolescence is a process not a light switch. Letting her off any responsibility for her actions by saying she was a child, when the 15 year old Shamima Begum clearly neither saw herself as one nor behaved like one is IMHO wrong.
She acted in a way that was so inconsistent with being a UK citizen that it looks like repudiation of any claim or wish to be one.
Letting her come back here and then charging her with offences isn't quite as simple as it appears. It would be impossible to prove she had committed most of them as they were committed abroad and any witnesses would be inaccessible or dead - apart that is, perhaps, something in the treason area, aligning oneself with the Queen's enemies. But that would involve being able to argue that the phrase 'war on terror' is more than just rhetoric.
Is anyone going to deny that there were people telling her that as a muslim her loyalty should be with ISIS, that fighting to defend ISIS from enemies of Islam (as they saw it) was a good thing, that supporting those fighters was a good thing etc? Is there anyone denying that she (and many others) fell for that message? Falling for that message of hate makes her a victim of those who pedalled it. Being a victim is not a crime.
Well she got there and within 10 days she was raped.
If you look at the Rochdale grooming case you will see the children were not forcibly abducted.
Also if, as you say, you can't gather evidence on what basis do you accuse her of extreme actions repudiation her citizenship ? We have not stripped IRA or UDF killers of citizenship on the grounds they killed our own people and professed they are not uk citizenship have we ? Why is she different, is it because she is brown ?
ISIS is a banned organisation isn't it? I'm inclined to agree with you about her moral responsibility, but it seems unlikely that none of the plethora of anti-terror offences would cover her.
Bring her back and put her on trial if there are charges to face. That's it. That's what a mature, robust democracy would do.
Also, what was said above about rendering someone stateless.
If she is dangerous, leaving her free in one of the poorer and more disorganized regions in the world would be a profoundly immoral thing to do.
Rendering someone stateless using the arguments extended by the British government is hugely problematic and is something that has all sorts of disturbing historical parallels (consider which other groups are in theory eligible for the citizenship of another country).
They appear to have travelled to Istanbul as a group, and then been helped across the Turkish/Syrian border by a coalition intelligence agent.
In terms of their previous contact with ISIS, a number of newspapers ran features on the topic at the time, and the one I remember was in Vice: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pgpvxn/how-a-british-college-student-became-an-isis-matchmaker
ISTM to me that these are not the only possible positions. It's perfectly possible to believe she is entirely culpable, and that it is still immoral to make her someone else's problem.
Being eligible for citizenship and being a citizen are not the same thing. To wit: my son is a French citizen. He is also entitled to British nationality on account of having a British parent (me) but for the time being we haven't done the necessary paperwork. I'm imagining a situation in which someone like my son committed a crime in another country and was stripped of their French nationality on the basis that they could still be British and wouldn't be left stateless. Why don't I think Her Majesty's Government would buy the argument?
I hate to say this but Donald Trump was absolutely correct about this case. He said "The Europeans are abdicating their responsibility". I'm sure that bringing her back to the UK will raise all sorts of difficult problems. But leaving her where she is just shuffles those problems (which are the UK's responsibility) off on another area of the world which has more than enough problems of its own to deal with. As for Bangladesh they must be thinking "If she's not the UK's problem, how can she possibly be our problem?"
This.
All hallmarks of the party currently governing the UK.
Exactly.
Perhaps the right thing to prevent future recurrences would be for Parliament to pass a law making it a crime to travel to Foreign-Office-specified "conflict zones" without official permission. Then it would be clear that a breach of UK law had occurred. But that horse has bolted in this case.
? it's because she's outside the border.
There's your answer. Faragists are waiting in the wings. And it had to be on Sajid Javid's watch didn't it?
You’re getting very close to saying that if someone truly believes what they are doing is Right then they can’t be guilty of a crime.
Was it done via Deliveroo then?
As I said - in an ideal world.
The fact is that radicalisation is still going on. It might (just might) be helpful to have someone who had been radicalised and then 'deprogrammed' who was willing to go into schools etc to tell their story and point out that the blissful paradise being promised is nothing but a lie.
If this, why not just quietly kill her or put her in one of those secret black torture sites? I'm sure the British authorities have done such things to others. If she's so bad and dangerous. Compare Omar Khadr. Different issues and behaviour, but also 15 years old.
It is, but how? If she'd been white Anglo-Saxon British they wouldn't have? You know this how?
Like you know '...quietly kill her or put her in one of those secret black torture sites... I'm sure the British authorities have done such things to others'. I know stuff that I shouldn't because the guys that were there told me. Guys that never met by a generation and different theatres. Borneo and the Falklands. People always talk. So what have they told you?
It is racist. It's fractally racist: no matter how closeup or far away you are it's still racist.
The tories gave themselves the power to revoke UK citizenship for dual nationals, and have now stretched that to anyone who kinda sorta could maybe claim another nationality (which includes me, as I could claim Canadian citizenship). The original purported intent was to allow the deportation of people who had moved here, attained citizenship and then been convicted of serious crimes. Pretty much by definition it overwhelmingly affects immigrants and their immediate descendants, and therefore disproportionately affects non-white folk.
Who knew?
I'm in the process of claiming Irish citizenship (well, my sister's the one doing all the work, bless her), so if the tories want to deport me to Dublin, or Cork, they're welcome.
If she is "a combatant on the losing side of a war" then she is de facto guilty of treason, surely? We no longer hang traitors, but we can imprison them for life.
It used to be the case that dual citizenship wasn't really a thing, and by taking on citizenship of a new country, you automatically rejected your previous country. I think there's an element of that in people's reaction to Ms Begum - they see her has having chosen to abandon the UK when she chose to emigrate to ISIS-controlled territory. Which becomes a bit awkward when the "country" she moved to is an insurrectionist movement that nobody recognizes as legitimate. Neither Syria nor Iraq wants a bunch of foreign rapist terrorists and their groupies to stay there, either.
So I tend to think that all the arguments in favour of withdrawing her UK citizenship are rather specious, because it's clear that there isn't a legitimate state on which she has a closer claim to citizenship. That makes her our problem. If she wants to come to the UK, admit her, arrest her, try and convict her of high treason, and imprison her for life.
Admittedly, having the entire state apparatus of IS obliterated complicates matters, but the statehood of the combatants wouldn't be in doubt.
The U.K. drone assassinated its own citizens in Syrian territory - just what is the legal justification for that ? We weren’t at war with Syria, they posed no direct and immediate threat to the U.K. - they were personally targeted rather than, say, being part of a platoon we happened to bomb because it was attacking a target we were attempting to protect.
We don’t have the death penalty - so what is the legal justification ?
It would be sensible to agree in international law, some process for declaring war (or a war like state) upon a none state entity such as ISIS or the IRA or whatever else. With clearly defined expectations about how states will act, and what happens to the participants in the war when it is over. Moreover, there is then a clear process for how you try combatants for crimes against humanity, where that is appropriate. But I note, we don’t typically imprison, mutilate or kill the wives of soldiers who lose a war.
I loathe everything ISIS/DAESH stands/stood for - but their abuse of human rights should not be copied by us. Otherwise, why bother opposing them in the first place.
Come to that it appears to be fine to go and fight for any number of mercenary private armies.
It should just be illegal, as a U.K. citizen, to soldier for any other organisation or state than the U.K. defence forces. (And we should not accept soldiers from other nations, and yes, I include the Gurkhas in that.)