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The Court of Appeal on Friday dismissed an effort by Shamima Begum, who left London at 15 to join the jihadist group Isis in Syria, to overturn a ruling depriving her of British citizenship.
Lady Chief Justice Lady Carr and two other judges upheld a decision made last year by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission that said the government acted lawfully in 2019 when it removed Begum’s citizenship.
The decision by then-home secretary Sajid Javid was based partly on confidential intelligence assessments that she represented a continuing threat to UK national security.
Begum’s case has been highly controversial because of the young age at which she travelled to Syria. Her supporters have argued she was too young to make an informed decision.
Friday’s ruling is the latest of several blows to efforts by Begum to return to the UK. In 2021, the Supreme Court dismissed her attempts to argue she should be allowed to return to the UK to argue her case before the SIAC.
All the decisions on Begum’s case have been made using both publicly available material and unpublished information from the security services.
“SIAC’s conclusion that this appeal must be dismissed, based both on the open and the closed material, was in my judgment correct,” Lady Carr wrote in the judgment, which the two other judges agreed with.
Begum’s lawyers had argued the SIAC was wrong on five grounds to uphold Javid’s original decision.
Among them was a claim that Begum, now 24 and living in Syria, would be de facto stateless. Javid had said she retained Bangladeshi citizenship through her parents but the South Asian country has said it will not admit her.
Her team also argued that Javid failed to consider properly whether Begum had been trafficked for sexual exploitation.
She was married off to Yago Riedijk, a Netherlands-born Isis fighter eight years her senior, almost immediately after she arrived in the group’s then territory in Syria.
Begum had travelled to Syria via Istanbul with two of her friends from school in Tower Hamlets, east London.
She had three children by Riedjik but all three died. Begum launched her efforts to return to the UK in 2019 after UK reporters discovered her living in a Syrian refugee camp after the collapse of Isis’s self-declared “caliphate” in the country.
The controversy over her case was further heightened in 2022 by revelations about Mohammed Al Rasheed, who facilitated the journey by Begum and her friends from Istanbul to Syria. The BBC reported Al Rasheed was providing information to Canada’s intelligence service at the same time.
Begum’s lawyers have until March 1 to decide whether to appeal against the latest decision.
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