Shamima Begum loses high court UK citizenship appeal

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Shamima Begum, the woman who was stripped of her British citizenship after joining the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria as a teenager, lost a bid on Wednesday to take her case to the United Kingdom’s top court.

Begum, who is now 24 years old, left her London home in 2015 to travel to Syria where she married an ISIS fighter. In 2019, she had her UK citizenship revoked on national security grounds after she was found at an ISIS camp in northeast Syria (Rojava), following the territorial collapse of the terror group.

The UK’s Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected Begum’s bid to appeal the revocation of her citizenship. She argued that the decision was unlawful and that officials did not properly consider whether she could have been a victim of trafficking. Supreme Court justices rejected her appeal on the grounds that it did “not raise an arguable point of law.”

Begum’s appeals were rejected twice, first by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) in February 2023 and by the UK’s court of appeal in February. Wednesday’s ruling said that she cannot appeal again.

Begum’s lawyers told the BBC that they will take the case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Between 2014 and 2019, thousands of militants from around the world joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) captured more than 10,000 ISIS militants and their families in the war to defeat the group that ended with a final battle in Baghouz, eastern Syria. The fighters are kept in detention centers while the families, including children, are kept in camps. Begum is living in one of these camps.

Rojava authorities have repeatedly called on the international community to repatriate their citizens living in these camps. However, the process has been slow, with many governments reluctant to bring their citizens home because of security concerns and doubts they would have sufficient evidence to obtain convictions in domestic courts.

In June 2023, the Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria (AANES), which governs Rojava, announced that it will put on trial foreign ISIS militants currently in its custody, saying they made this decision because of the international community’s failure to establish a specialized court to handle these prosecutions and refusal of governments to repatriate their citizens.