Shamima Begum Lost Her Bid to Regain British Citizenship. Here’s Why Her Case Matters

Shamima Begum, who made international headlines as an “ISIS bride” in 2019 after pleading with the U.K. government to allow her to return to give birth to her son, lost her appeal Wednesday against a decision made three years ago by the U.K.’s Home Office to revoke her British nationality.

Begum, who was born in London and is of Bangladeshi origin, traveled to Syria aged 15 to join Islamic State, where she married an IS fighter and had three children, all of whom have since died. She resurfaced at the al-Roj refugee camp in northeast Syria in 2019.

Begum’s lawyers say the decision will leave her “de-facto stateless” and that she is a victim of child trafficking.

The decision could potentially become a landmark ruling, Harjap Singh Bhangal, a prominent U.K. lawyer and immigration law expert, tells TIME. “In effect, millions of British citizens whose parents have migrated from abroad before them are eligible to have their citizenship stripped if the government sees them as a national threat,” he says.

Below, what to know about the hugely controversial Begum case.

What did the Special Immigration Appeals Commission rule?

Last November, Begum’s lawyers argued in an appeal hearing that she and two school friends had been subjected to grooming and manipulation to join Islamic State—and that, in effect, she was a victim of child trafficking.

In its Wednesday ruling, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) said it had found there was a “credible suspicion” that she was a victim of trafficking to Syria. “The motive of bringing her to Syria was sexual exploitation for which, as a child, she could not give valid consent,” said the presiding judge Robert Jay. He added that various state bodies in the U.K. had breached their duties in permitting Begum to leave the country as she did, which allowed her to eventually cross the border from Turkey to Syria.

Nevertheless, the Commission rejected Begum’s appeal on the grounds that it had no power to trump the Home Secretary’s decision, even if the case was found to be in her favor. It added that several British women remain detained in refugee camps in Syria despite having British citizenship.

“Reasonable people will differ as to the threat she posed in February 2019 to the national security of the United Kingdom, and as to how that threat should be balanced against all countervailing considerations,” said Jay. “However, under our constitutional settlement, these sensitive issues are for the Secretary of State to evaluate and not for the commission.”

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What does SIAC’s ruling mean for Shamima Begum?

Bhangal tells TIME that the ruling effectively means that the courts think “Begum’s exclusion from the U.K. is justified” and that her chances of returning “seem bleak.”

However, human rights lawyer Shoaib M Khan added there are further rights of appeal available to Begum and that her lawyers have said they will take the case further. “One hopes that a more superior court will find it within its powers to actually review the decision and rule on whether it was correct and humane,” Khan tells TIME.

He adds, “to attempt to disown a British person as soon as they commit a crime, however heinous, is morally and legally wrong. Other countries have taken their people back from the war zones, and the U.K. should do the same. We need to take responsibility for our people and their actions.”

Are there wider implications for the SIAC’s ruling?

Critics of the Home Office’s decision to strip Begum of British nationality say it creates a dangerous precedent by creating different tiers of citizenship.

“This ruling could make many people ‘second class’ citizens. For example a British offender with parents born in the U.K. will be sentenced and tried in the U.K. for their crimes, but will still remain a British citizen but a British offender whose parents were born abroad can now be excluded from the U.K. and lose their citizenship,” Bhangal says.

It’s a position that runs counter to other Western governments. In 2015, Canada’s then-opposition leader Justin Trudeau said that a “Canadian is a Canadian” amid news that the Conservative government had stripped citizenship from a convicted terrorist.

The SIAC’s ruling could also set a dangerous precedent for victims of child trafficking, a human rights lawyer representing Begum said. “No British child who is being trafficked outside the UK will be protected by the British state if the home secretary invokes national security,” said Gareth Peirce.

Does Shamima Begum have dual citizenship?

Begum does not hold any other nationality. Begum’s father resides in Bangladesh and her mother is believed to be a Bangladeshi national, and the U.K. government has argued that under Bangladeshi law, this means Begum is automatically a citizen of the country as well. However, Begum previously told the BBC that she only had “one citizenship.” “I wasn’t born in Bangladesh, I’ve never seen Bangladesh and I don’t even speak Bengali properly, so how can they claim I have Bangladeshi citizenship,” she said.

Bangladesh’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that Begum is not a Bangladeshi citizen, that she had never applied for dual nationality with Bangladesh, and that she had never visited the country. In a statement in 2019, it said that it was “deeply concerned” that Begum had been “erroneously identified” as a Bangladeshi national.

It added that there was “no question” of her being allowed into the country given the country had a “zero tolerance” approach to terrorism and violent extremism.

What about “Jihadi Jack”?

Jack Letts, nicknamed “Jihadi Jack” in the media, is another British teenager who left the U.K. to join Islamic State. He was 18 years old when he traveled to Syria in 2014 to become an IS fighter after converting to Islam. Letts, who held dual British-Canadian citizenship, was captured and jailed by Kurdish YPG forces in Syria while he was trying to flee to Turkey in 2017.

Letts, who was born in Oxford, had pleaded with the U.K. government to allow him to return to his country of birth, pledging he had “no intention” of harming anyone. But in 2019, the U.K.’s Home Office stripped Letts of his British citizenship, rendering him the responsibility of the Canadian government, which accused the U.K. of “off-loading” its responsibilities.

In January, it was announced that Letts would be repatriated to Canada along with 23 other Canadian citizens following a court ruling. “The conditions of the … men are even more dire than those of the women and children who Canada has just agreed to repatriate,” the ruling stated.