Written by Steve Clarke,Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities and Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford,
& School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Charles Sturt University
Shamima Begum, who left the UK in 2015 at age 15, to join the Islamic State, has been the subject of consistent media attention since she was discovered in the Al-Hawl refugee camp in Northern Syria, in February this year. Soon after being discovered in the refugee camp Begum was controversially stripped of her UK citizenship by Home Secretary Sajid Javid. Citizenship can be removed by the Home Secretary if doing so is deemed to be ‘conducive to the public good’. While it is illegal to render a person stateless, the Home Secretary is entitled to deprive UK citizens of their citizenship if they are also citizens of another country, or if they are eligible for citizenship in another country. Begum may be eligible for citizenship of Bangladesh, given that she has Bangladeshi ancestry, and there is a legal argument that she already is a citizen of Bangladesh.[1]
The Home Secretary’s decision has been much discussed in the media. Some commentators have argued that Begum’s interests should not be trumped by considerations of the public good. Others have questioned the legality of the decision. Still others have complained about the secretive nature of the decision-making process that led the Home Office to recommend to the Home Secretary that Begum be deprived of her citizenship. Here I will be concerned with a different issue. I will set aside considerations of Begum’s interests and I will set aside legal and procedural considerations. I will focus on the question of whether or not it is actually conducive to the public good in the UK to deprive Begum of her citizenship. Like most people, I do not have access to all of the information that the Home Secretary may have been apprised of, regarding Begum’s activities while she was living in the Islamic State, which would have informed his decision. So what I will have to say is necessarily speculative.
Begum has claimed to have been a housewife for the four years during which she was living in the Islamic State. However, there have been allegations that she was a member of the Hisba, the Islamic State’s morality police, in charge of enforcing strict Islamic dress codes and punishing practices deemed un-Islamic.[2] There have also been claims that she stitched suicide bombers into explosive vests, preventing them from removing the vests without detonating them.[3] These allegations do seem relevant to the decision to revoke her citizenship. If true, they suggest that she is, or has been, an enthusiastic supporter of the Islamic State and an abetter of terrorism. Also relevant are some ill-considered media comments she made earlier this year. In one interview she suggested that the Manchester Arena bombing of 2017, which resulted in 23 civilian deaths, was justifiable as a form of retaliation for coalition bombing in the Islamic State. In the same interview she also offered an apparent justification for the killing, enslavement and rape of Yazidi women in the Islamic State.[4]These comments do not strike me as actual instances of Begum encouraging terrorism, however they suggest that she remains sympathetic to terrorists and her sympathies for terrorists might lead her to encourage terrorism in the future.
Why might it be conducive to the public good to strip Shamima Begum of her UK citizenship? I take it that only very serious considerations are sufficient to justify an action as significant as revocation of citizenship. Her lack of empathy for others and her confused reasoning about the justifiability of some terrorist acts, while regrettable, do not constitute anything nearly significant enough to justify the revocation of citizenship. What might constitute a sufficient reason to revoke her citizenship would be if there was a realistic chance that her return to the UK would threaten national security. If she was likely to conduct a terrorist act, or assist terrorists in conducting such an act, or encourage terrorism, upon return to the UK, then there might be prima facie reason to revoke her citizenship and so prevent her from returning to the UK. It may be that the Home Office has concluded that she is likely to do one or more of these things if she were to return to the UK, and so has revoked her citizenship in order to prevent her return.
On the basis of the information that is available in the public domain, it seems very hard to believe that Begum would have the opportunity to conduct a terrorist act, or to assist terrorists should she return to the UK. Given her new-found notoriety she would be vanishingly unlikely to have an opportunity to plan a terrorist act without this being uncovered. Nor is it at all likely that she would have the opportunity to assist terrorists. Any competent terrorist would steer well clear of a celebrity Islamic State returnee. The most realistic source of concern is that she might attempt to encourage terrorism were she to return to the UK. However, this does not strike me as a good reason to prevent her return. If she were of a mind to attempt to encourage terrorism she could do so from any place where she had access to the internet. So, it is hard to see how allowing Begum to return to the UK would enhance her ability to encourage terrorism. On the contrary, a return to the UK would diminish her ability to encourage terrorism, because she would be under close scrutiny in the UK, and would be liable to be prosecuted were she to attempt to encourage terrorism, and could be jailed for up to seven years. While she remains in a relatively lawless part of Syria she is much more likely to be able to encourage terrorism and go unpunished.
The Home Secretary does not have to be satisfied that someone poses a threat to national security to revoke their citizenship. Citizenship can also be revoked if someone is deemed to have breached their duty of loyalty to the UK ‘so fundamentally that it cannot be reasonable to expect the state to continue to provide him with the protection that flows from citizenship’.[5] While Begum’s possible participation in the Islamic State’s morality police and possible provision of support for Islamic State suicide bombers are lamentable, it is hard to construe them as constituting a fundamental breach of loyalty to the UK. All the information that has so far come to light suggests that at most Begum was a minor contributor to the functioning of the Islamic State. It is very hard to see how her minor contributions to the Islamic State could constitute a fundamental breach of her duty of loyalty to the UK.
It could be that Sajid Javid revoked Begum’s citizenship because he decided, inter alia, that it is in the public interest to send a message to would-be terrorists and abetters and encouragers of terrorism: if you attempt to commit terrorist acts, assist terrorist acts, or encourage terrorism then you will be liable to have your citizenship revoked too. If he has reasoned this way then, I think, he has made a mistake. It’s far from clear that many terrorists and supporters of terrorism who are eligible for, or hold, dual citizenship, will be deterred by the threat of losing citizenship in a country whose values and institutions they already reject, especially if they are able to continue to commit, abet or encourage terrorist acts elsewhere, after they have had their UK citizenship revoked. A far better deterrent is to prosecute terrorists and their supporters, and jail those found to have broken the law.
I’ve examined potential reasons for revoking Shamima Begum’s citizenship and suggested that none of them seem particularly decisive. It might be that there are good reasons for revoking the citizenship of some supporters of the Islamic State, but it doesn’t appear that any of them apply to Begum. I want to end by mentioning two important reasons for not revoking Begum’s citizenship. The first reason is that the revocation of her citizenship contributes to a growing sense of ‘citizenship insecurity’ in the UK. There are many UK citizens living in the UK, who either hold dual citizenship, or are eligible for dual citizenship. As things stand they are all liable to have their citizenship revoked and to be evicted from their homes in the UK and forcibly relocated to other counties, as a result of a secretive deliberation process conducted in the Home Office. This ongoing state of citizenship insecurity is distressing to all of these UK citizens.
The second reason for not revoking Begum’s citizenship is that doing so harms the international reputation of the UK. It makes the UK look like an irresponsible country that seeks to impose problems created in the UK on others. The Bangladeshi Foreign Minister has made it very clear that Bangladesh has no desire to accept Begum as either a citizen or a resident; and the UK’s attempt to impose the problem of having to deal with her on Bangladesh has been described as an instance of ‘human fly tipping’ by Tasnime Akunjee, the lawyer for Begum’s family.[6] There is much justice in Akunjee’s accusation. Begum’s only connection to Bangladesh is that her parents happen to have been born there. Bangladesh bears no responsibility for Shamima Begum’s behaviour, whereas the UK does. Like it or not, the UK allowed the conditions to arise in which Shamima Begum and many other UK citizens decided to go and join the Islamic State. The UK should take responsibility for the international problems it has contributed to, and should not seek to palm this responsibility off on other counties.
Notes
[1] See: https://www.ejiltalk.org/shamima-begum-may-be-a-bangladeshi-citizen-after-all/
[2] See: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/shamima-begum-isis-syria-morality-police-suicide-belts-a8869016.html
[3] See: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/shamima-begum-isis-syria-morality-police-suicide-belts-a8869016.html
[4] See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47276572
[5] See: https://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2019/03/01/shamina-begum-is-stripping-her-of-her-citizenship-the-right-response/
[6] See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-48154781
Rot. She joined the forces of a self-declared state whose role was to declare war on western values and people. Her parents and her closed Moslem community framed her views not the UK. They should be responsible.
Internet fora and ISPs can be centred anywhere. The person’s sharing the fora and responsible for content and parents for controlling use and access.
Teachers are not responsible for life outside the school, unless they are encouraging, providing or facilitating such.
Shamima may be UK born but may never have been entitled to UK citizenship. Proofs of parents’ nationality and status have not been shared.
Her parents are from Bangladesh and her father lives there most of the time. He apparently fathered her whilst commuting between his UK-based family and Bangladesh, where he lives with another wife. He states he is a retired tailor at 60, and from 1990s prior to her birth he had dual or multiple households and families. He, thereby, did not and does not support the western morality and values, but those of his religion and culture. As Shamima was born in the UK to a mother sharing her “husband” with at least one other “wife”, it is likely that her parents have a Sharia marriage and both reject western values. In consequence, the UK, in its value of personal freedom, allowed the persistence of non-western values in the Moslem communities of Tower Hamlets, which can be considered self-ruled communities transplanted mainly from one region of the sub-continent. UK influence on Shamima is limited to state schooling, as she is from a closed community. Her religious teaching and influences was from her family and immigrant community and the internet fora she visited, which are/were probably not UK-based.
UK born, but not affiliated to UK. She would only, at the time of her birth, be granted British nationality if her mother had indefinite leave to remain and complied with continuous residence requirements, or had become a naturalised British citizen. Her parents were probably not legally married (Sharia marriage not legal in UK), so British nationality depends on mother’s status.
We have not been told how her mother earns/ed a living, after her father “returned to Bangladesh in 1990s to take another wife”.
Have they (both parents) been supported by the state benefits for life. Has the father messed up his retirement funds as a result of his public profile and residencies becoming known to the UK services?
The naming conventions of the Bangladeshi Moslem communities are such that it is impossible to trace family connections and registry records – many women use the title Begum as a surname as men use Miah and a child can be registered with any name not reflecting parentage. If there is no standard surname, as in UK convention, it is impossible for a Registrar to know if the residential status of the parent/s affords British nationality to the child. Thus a child is included in UK register, but may not be a British citizen, but believes themself to be. A more thorough investigation into nationality occurs only when a passport is requested – not for benefit claims or access to public services. As Shamima stole her sister’s passport, she may never have been through the process to prove her nationality and remains in UK law a Bangladeshi citizen by dint of her mother being a Bangladeshi citizen (not declared when or if she acquired British citizenship for herself/children). Shamima is Bangladeshi until or unless she has proved that at the time of her birth, her mother had indefinite leave to remain in the UK, and had been resident in the UK continuously for the periods required to enable Shamima to acquire British citizenship by birth. (Laws changed in 2002 to enable an unmarried British father to pass nationality to his child.) Even if her parents were legally married in the UK, by her father’s declaration that he shared his time between the UK and Bangladesh since 1990s, unless he was a British citizen at the time of her birth, he could not pass the continuous residency requirements criteria for his daughter to acquire British citizenship by being born in the UK.
Being born in a stable dies not make you a donkey.
NR’s statement “Shamima stole her sister’s passport, she may never have been through the process to prove her nationality and remains in UK law a Bangladeshi citizen by dint of her mother being a Bangladeshi citizen (not declared when or if she acquired British citizenship for herself/children). Contains a disparity which may disprove itself.
Was Shamimas sister born of the same parentage she was? If so why did Shamima steal her sister’s passport rather than obtain her own. It would seem rational in the circumstances to assume that the theft was to avoid her parents questions of why she required a passport; potentially leading to the foiling of her juvenile plans. A situation which would go far to ameliorate against many of the other statements made regarding closed communities.
I have a great confusion in my comprehension regarding the statements questioning Shamimas’ citizenship and that only those children born in lawful wedlock under UK regulations may become UK citizens. i.e. This would mean that children conceived as a result of rape in the UK and subsequently born there cannot become UK citizens. An example which patently reveals the error. But even more importantly the UK government has stated it has ‘revoked’ her citizenship, something which cannot happen unless they accept that citizenship exists.
Accepting that the power matrix in british politics has publicly become skewed far to the right in recent years, and this revocation of citizenship is in line with the predominantly espoused ideology, rejecting the work of many generations directed at ensuring that all people ‘belong’ (a wrong word, but appropriate in the context of this discussion) and therefore have a social grouping at the nation state level who will support, or speak up for them; The then inevitable exertions of power as a means of achieving or protecting dominance over any smaller social goup continue to erode the broader/wider moral/ethical base within those nation states which move in those directions. The older more understanding dominance without hegemony which spilled out of the raj and days of empire in the UK may today clearly be seen to be a thing of the past, as reflecting back what is received is singularly perceived as an exertion of power in itself rather than understood for the questions it may pose. To ‘belong’ to any social group does not mean one fully agrees with all its values or will maintain them all the time! Unfortunately many young people feel that very thing with great fervor, until and if they gain a better understanding. Would that comment fit Shamima and many others? If so then British politics and society has failed its members in capital letters and gone on to resorted to methods of suppression and domination as a means of achieving security, in the same way that many other social groups (which includes religions) attempt to.
The Home Office has not provided a full explanation, nor have the parents. They may not ever do so.
You need to review the specific nationality laws to understand the nuances of when, where and under what circumstances a child is/was born in the UK grants British citizenship or the right to apply for it.
The laws have changed over the years, and are not always retroactive.
Today, a person born in UK to a non-British mother is not automatically a British citizen. There are further requirements.
A person born to a British mother in the UK is automatically British.
A person born in the UK to a mother deemed “settled” (see rules) can claim British nationality.
A child can live in the UK with “settled” parents without having the right to British nationality.
There are issues regarding the right to British citizenship through the father depending on when and where born.
In some families, there are children who were born in the UK with the right to British nationality by birth whereas their siblings do not. Many parents incorrectly assume all their children are British because they were born here and they registered their birth here. Issues arise when a passport is requested and the supporting documents are examined and prove the child is not British. This was recently highlighted in Windrush, but not limited to that sector.
EU law does not grant citizenship. The independent EU countries grant citizenship according to local laws, some stricter than others.
According to Dal Babu, former Chief Superintendent of the Met, there were multiple failures in safeguarding Shamima Begum as a 14 year old, when the online grooming for radicalisation process began. “Ideological Persuasion” is one of the Online Risks that children face, as identified and categorised by the EU Kids Online project. Her school, social workers and police knew she was being radicalised, yet failed to act properly. The Met Police’s former Chief Commissioner Hogan-Howe has formally apologised to the families for this. The Home Secretary’s decision to revoke Shamima Begum’s citizenship is going through the courts as that may have been itself an illegal act as Ms Begum doesn’t appear to have recourse to Bangladeshi citizenship. Indeed the Bangali government have said they will execute her if she goes there. I can’t post a link to the podcast interview I did with Dal Babu on this topic, but you can find it on my charity’s website Safetonet Foundation dot org.
Doesn’t Mr Babu claim to be a family friend?
That political action has left the UK in a worse position than described. Because Shamima Begum now has no citizenship, she is outside of the legal regime and any charges which may lawfully be brought. This leaves open any narrative regarding her early life options and choices to people so inclined as to create one. Subsequently many of the circumstances of her radicalisation and consequent welcoming by ISIS, as well as her actions within that social group, and that social groups actions to her/others, will probably be biased in various ways, rather than being written by reference to facts as determined in a fully public, and ideally fair, criminal trial (which ought at the least be more balanced). Let any political debate regarding the public good after that then be equally informed on all sides.
Unfortunately it is probable that due to her removal from the legal regime, much of the hard evidence regarding her radicalisation and any attempts to correct that is likely to be lost or reduced as a normal course of events. Difficult as it probably is for her and her relatives and those involved, responsibility for offences she, and the friends she took with her, may have committed do need to be looked at in a court of law if any really valuable social lessons are to be learned, rather than ideologically imposed by more limited information. People apologising and advising or indicating improvements which need to be taken (mainly suited to their own interests) would not seem to achieve the same social outcomes; indeed those outcomes are more likely to result in more idealised monitoring and controls on the populace to create adherence to a stricter set of views which enable compliance to be shown by produced evidence which is itself justifying the systems producing that material. Accepting that the laws of the land being used as a measure by the courts are often determined by the whim of a political will blowing in the wind of whatever ideological factors are/were the flavour of the day the best method of determining the ‘facts’ in criminal cases available to society at the moment, remains a criminal trial conducted by a properly independent judiciary which fairly airs all sides and details of a case within the legal order it works in order to reach a judgement.
On a different thread – at the time she was radicalised and thereafter, Shamima Begum was a citizen of the European Union. Does the removal of UK citizenship (legal or illegal) also remove her European Citizenship and take her outside the jurisdiction of the European Courts? Strict logic would say yes, but that does not feel correct…
In Bangladesh she would have been married at 15, with limited freedom and education. She may have been already promised in marriage and perhaps that is what drove her to look for herself.
Not many feel sorry for her, and few see the point in investigating her reasons for going. It is clear that the local mosques and family environment encouraged her decision to join Daesh. The social workers and criminal systems are busy and don’t need an investigation. There is nothing for society to learn from this willful teenager. She will grow into a willful old lady and not repent.
“In Bangladesh she would have been married at 15” = all 15 year old girls in Bangladesh are married. Not sure this is a tenable position to hold.
The EU isn’t a State as such, it’s a “virtual State”. Should a member State leave, then EU “citizenship” of the leaving State’s citizens ends (I think).
I think the focus seems to have been placed upon EU citizenship when my comment was intended as an observation regarding the EU legal regime. My feeling, on the point, of ‘incorrectness’ arose out of the history of Europe and how statelessness has previously been used to remove people from legal regimes otherwise providing them with some form of social protection, in order to coerce them in particular ways as a means of advancing others interests. In a social grouping of nation states (EEC) arising against that type of background, (when international rules had recently been put in place in an attempt to preclude such actions in the future,) it did not seem correct that any subsequently agreed legal regime for such a group could so easily facilitate such a thing. This was given additional weight when considering more recent and not too dissimilar european events. (Do not conflate these comments with freedom of the individual – it is considering the freedoms expressed by differing social groups (deliberately conflated) operating at a nation state level or beyond – and so would include such groups as ISIS and religions). As to the UK citizenship issue, it still seems to me that the UK Governments revocation of citizenship (or more properly in the United Kingdom, a Subject.) inherently admits to an existing membership.
Feelings of sorrow are for social groups at the nation state level letting themselves down so badly, as well as how in todays world juvenile rebellion can result in something so tragic, creating clear social moral and ethical dilemmas based upon so many wrongs. Both harrowing thoughts which any right thinking social group would wish to reflect fully and openly upon in order to learn the maximum possible. Differing degrees of denial would prevent a full understanding happening, and there would be grave dangers of a – national – revenge show trial taking place in the UK, but the learning experiences coming out of a public trial, (under the applicable legal rules for juveniles in this case) provided the judiciary involved were truly independent rather than playing politics; would be required if any nation state grouping as a whole were to learn how to avoid similar issues in the future. Tinkering with psychological issues in the sidelines does not resolve the immediate and wider cultural issues amongst the different social groups, or the angst created by refusing to look at what caused the difficulties experienced. Neither does killing the offenders which merely serves to suppress the issues, although such action may further the effectiveness of political manipulations creating outcomes which may be viewed as ethically right from particular perspectives, whilst blindly creating more tensions in the values of many of the social groups involved. It would seem far more beneficial to assist all the social groups involved to understand fully what happened allowing them to formulate more informed responses within their own groups. At the moment there generally appears to have been only immediate and emotionally driven reactions rather than attempts to create a broader understanding of what went wrong, both at the individual and the social level. An indication of that factor is where contributions to this blog thread could be seen, from some perspectives, as blocking their own attempts to understand.
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