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The 21-year-old, who joined ISIL as a child, is being held in a detention camp in Syria after her British citizenship was stripped from her in 2019.
The UK’s highest court ruled on Friday that Shamima Begum, a woman who was stripped of her citizenship after fleeing to Syria to join ISIL (ISIS), should not be able to return to the country to challenge the decision because she poses a risk to safety.
Begum left London in 2015 when he was 15 years old and went to Syria via Turkey with two friends.
Now 21, she is currently being held in a detention camp in Syria after then-Interior Minister Sajid Javid stripped her of British citizenship in 2019. At the time, she argued that Begum was eligible for Bangladeshi citizenship, the country of birth of your parents.
International law prohibits countries from making people stateless by revoking their only citizenship.
The UK Court of Appeals previously agreed that he could only have a fair appeal of Javid’s decision if he was allowed to return to the country.
But the UK High Court overturned that decision in its unanimous ruling on Friday, meaning that while you can still file your appeal against the decision to take away your citizenship, you cannot do so in Britain.
The UK government had argued that intelligence agencies concluded that those siding with ISIL posed a serious current risk to national security.
“If a vital public interest – in this case, the safety of the public – makes it impossible for a case to be heard fairly, then the courts normally cannot hear it,” the Supreme Court justices concluded.
In Syria, Begum married an ISIL fighter and lived in Raqqa, the capital of the self-proclaimed caliphate. She has had three children since leaving the UK, but all the babies have since died.
Her case has been the subject of heated debate in the UK, pitting those who say she gave up her right to citizenship by traveling to join ISIL against those who argue that she should not remain stateless, but face trial in the country that left Syria. .
Javid welcomed the Supreme Court ruling, saying that the Home Secretary “is responsible for the security” of UK citizens and borders and therefore “should have the power to decide whether anyone who represents a serious threat to that security “can enter the country.
“There are no simple solutions to this situation, but any restrictions on rights and freedoms that this person faces is a direct consequence of the extreme actions that she and others have taken,” Javid said in a statement posted on Twitter.
But the British human rights group Liberty denounced the result.
“The right to a fair trial protects us all. Stripping someone of citizenship without due process sets a dangerous precedent, ”the group tweeted.
Liberty said that although the government had claimed that Begum was eligible for Bangladeshi citizenship, he was born in the UK and had never held a Bangladeshi passport.
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