The European Court of Human Rights has reopened the long-settled case of Shamima Begum, the “ISIS bride” who was stripped of British citizenship in 2019 after travelling to join the Islamic State, raising the possibility it may rule against the UK government.
The nascent debate in the United Kingdom over British citizenship, to whom it is awarded, and from whom it should be taken away, stands to be pushed to even greater public significance as the already controversial European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) moves to involve itself in the controversial and years-old case of Shamima Begum.
Begum, who ran away to the Islamic State with schoolfriends to become so-called “jihadi brides” in 2015, later ended up in a prisoner camp in Syria after the collapse of ISIS.
With an apparently blasé indifference, Begum described at the time how she’d felt totally unmoved by seeing her “first” decapitated head because it had belonged to an enemy of Islam. A 2019 interview found her unrepentant for having gone to join the Islamic State, and she described herself as having abandoned ISIS as it collapsed, saying she “saluted” those women who stayed behind.
These remarks and others triggered national outrage in Britain and demands for her citizenship to be revoked, which were met later that year. She and her lawyers have attempted to get that decision overturned, with several appeals to British courts and tribunals, all the way up to the Supreme Court. As reported in 2023, an apparently coordinated media campaign was underway to rebrand her as essentially culturally British and deserving of patriation.
Now Begum is attempting to get a better answer from a foreign court, the ECHR, a body against which public opinion is already clearly turning, with both Nigel Farage’s Reform and the Conservative Parties saying they would withdraw from the court if they formed a future government. The Times of London reports that the court has written to the British government to demand it explain whether it acted lawfully and in line with ECHR obligations in revoking Begum’s citizenship.
Once the court has received written submissions from both parties and considered their merits it will decide on whether to proceed to a full hearing, it was stated. Per the report, Begum’s lawyers have already told the ECHR that they believe the British government failed to consider whether Begum had not actually been responsible for her actions when she snuck out of Britain to join the Islamic State, and may in fact have been groomed and trafficked.
Several figures have already expressed concern at the ECHR reopening the case. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage told The Daily Express that it is “outrageous” that the ECHR would presume to try and make decisions on matters of national security on behalf of Britain. Begum “must not be allowed back”, he said, stating that the court becoming involved in the UK shredding the passports of defectors to the Islamic State shows “why we must leave” the ECHR.
The Conservative Party also now states Britain should leave the court — although it did nothing whatsoever to achieve this during its recently terminated 14 years in power — and their home affairs spokesman, Chris Philp, said Begum has “no place” in Britain. He said: “Under no circumstances should Shamima Begum be allowed back into the UK. She chose to go and support the violent Islamist extremists of Daesh, who murdered opponents, raped thousands of women and girls and threw people off buildings for being gay.”
Given the present Labour government’s devotion to international human rights law — some top members of the government, including the Prime Minister, are human rights lawyers by trade — Philp said he doubted the government would try to push back against any ruling the ECHR would attempt to impose.
De-facto Conservative Party leader Robert Jenrick was even more forthright in his response to the case, in line with his self-re-invention as a migration hardliner. If European courts were so keen on looking after Begum she should be given citizenship in a European Union member state, he said, remarking: “She can go and live in Belgium, Luxembourg, or Strasbourg. But most people in this country rightly do not want someone associated with ISIS coming here to live among us.”
Jenrick said begum had joined ISIS of her own free will, a “catastrophic misjudgement” and said it was essential that the United Kingdom government be able to make key decisions on national security without outside interference, calling the foreign court trying to overrule an elected government’s decisions “fundamentally undemocratic”.
The ECHR intervention comes, with remarkable timing, just as the notion of Britishness and the meaning of British citizenship becomes part of the public conversation in the United Kingdom, perhaps for the first time in a generation. These matters were kicked into the limelight by the decision by the British government to use the post-Christmas news lull to crow about its great achievement of having imported an Egyptian “blogger” long imprisoned in his native country over alleged involvement in the 2011 Arab Spring-era Egyptian revolution and other political activity since.
The British government had previously given the man UK citizenship under murky circumstances, and no sooner had he arrived in Britain than demands began to deport him again, and to strip him of that paperwork. The Guardian reflected on the rapidly shifting Overton Window on citizenship and deportation, and decried Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer for being “too slow or sheepish” to make the left-wing case forcefully.
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