British-born Shamima Begum in Roj camp, Syria. (Photo by Sam Tarling/Getty Images)
Shamima Begum, the British-born woman who had her citizenship removed after travelling to Syria to join the Islamic State in 2015, has lost her final appeal to regain it. The case has implications for British citizens with dual citizenship, and particularly Britons with non-white ethnic heritage.
The Begum case has long been controversial in the U.K. As a teenager, a radicalized Begum left her home in Bethnal Green, East London. She travelled with two friends to Syria, where she married an IS fighter. She gave birth to three children, though none survived, and eventually turned up in a refugee camp in Northern Syria, kicking off a media frenzy in the U.K.
On one side, many Britons argued she should be returned to the U.K. to face trial in her home country. Others argued that by leaving to join IS, she had effectively renounced her citizenship and should never be allowed to return. The British Home Secretary, responsible for citizenship matters in the U.K., was in a tricky position. Under international law, you can’t take away someone’s citizenship if that would leave them ‘stateless.’ This was not a problem in the case of Jack Letts, for instance. Letts, a British citizen who also left to join IS, held Canadian citizenship through his father. Take away one citizenship, and he still has the other, so he is not made stateless.
Begum, on the other hand, held only British citizenship. Born to Bangladeshi parents, she was in theory eligible for Bangladeshi citizenship but did not have it at the time (the government of Bangladesh later stated she did not have, and would never be allowed, Bangladeshi citizenship).
Nonetheless, then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid decided this possibility of a second citizenship was enough to strip Begum of her British one. That decision led to a series of legal challenges, culminating in this final Supreme Court ruling. Those legal challenges were more focused on how Javid made his decision, but at the same time, the decision opened up the possibility of the U.K. having a two-tier citizenship system.
Because Begum was a second-generation Briton, and from a non-white ethnic background, she was more identifiable in her non-British heritage than say, a white person with a standard “British” name would be. As a result, Home Secretary Javid could more easily assume she had access to a foreign citizenship, which is the standard for stripping someone of British citizenship.
This decision meant that potentially millions of first-, second- or even third-generation Britons could be subject to the same. More recent changes to U.K. law mean the Home Secretary is also not obliged to inform a person that their citizenship has been revoked.
The government justified this latter change by arguing it would apply to situations where it would be difficult or impossible to contact a person who was to have their citizenship stripped. Nonetheless, this has big implications for people who are even suspected of terror- or militant-related activity abroad, no matter what they were actually doing.
In theory, someone could travel outside the U.K. for a considerable amount of time, and not know they are no longer British until they try to travel again. Having been unknowingly rendered stateless, and potentially missing the chance to appeal the decision, they would find themselves in legal limbo, as is the case with Shamima Begum who remains in a North Syria camp.
Conversations about whether someone who joins a foreign terror group should lose their right to live in their birth country are valid, but are beside the point to this specific issue. By creating a precedent wherein non-white citizens are more vulnerable to being rendered stateless than white citizens, the Home Secretary created a second-class of Britons. This class are, specifically because of their ‘foreign’ and non-white heritage, less secure in their citizenship.
