The British judiciary will rule on Wednesday over the loss of citizenship of Shamima Begum, who emigrated to Syria in 2015 at the age of 15 to join the jihadist group Islamic State.
The case of Shamima Begum had attracted particular public attention due to her young age when she went to Syria.
She had left her East London neighborhood with two friends. In Syria, she married an ISIS jihadist of Dutch descent eight years her senior and had two children who died young.
After fleeing the fighting, she found herself in a Syrian camp in February 2019. Pregnant with a child who died shortly after birth, sparking criticism of the British government, she expressed a desire to return to Britain, but London stripped her of her citizenship citing national security.
His family denies this deprivation of citizenship. Her appeal was heard by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) in November.
In early 2020, the SIAC had ruled that the decision did not make Shamima stateless because she was of Bangladeshi descent. But Dhaka refused to take her because she never applied for Bangladeshi citizenship.
One of the issues at stake in this appeal was whether the UK government had legitimate national security reasons to prevent Shamima Begum from returning to the UK.
During the November hearing, the defense presented the girl as a victim of human trafficking organized by IS.
“This case concerns a 15-year-old British child who was influenced… by the effective and determined ISIS propaganda machine… to marry him off to an ISIS fighter,” his lawyer Samantha Knights said.
“It’s about national security (…) It’s not about child trafficking,” said government attorney James Eadie.
In 2021, Shamima Begum asked the UK to leave her behind. “I know I didn’t do anything in EI other than being a mother and a wife,” the young woman in the tank top told ITV. “The only crime I committed was being stupid enough to join ISIS.”
But she had sparked outrage the previous year in an interview in which she expressed no regrets. Then she wore a black veil that fell to her feet.