Shamima Begum

KPXBLN said:
I see this differently to the majority on here, clearly. The wrongs Begum has done (both legal and moral) are a seperate matter from whether the government has the right to strip her of her citizenship. I found this a very clear exposition of the stakes. https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2019/february/who-s-next

"The home secretary, Sajid Javid, has revoked Shamima Begum’s British citizenship. Begum left the UK with two friends four years ago, at the age of 15, to join Daesh. She now finds herself stateless, with a newborn and possibly British baby in a Syrian refugee camp. Public sympathy in the UK has been limited. Begum has said she wasn’t ‘fazed’ by the sight of severed heads in bins, and suggested that the Manchester Arena bombing was payback for airstrikes against Daesh territory. She has regrets, but little remorse. Still, she was born and grew up in the UK, and when she left as a child she had been groomed online by a criminal organisation.

The use of an administrative process to strip Begum of her nationality sets a worrying precedent, if you value the rule of law and are concerned that citizens be protected from tyranny. Someone who has been stripped of their nationality and made stateless loses most of the protections of the state. A dual national who is deprived of the nationality of the country where they have grown up, and where their friends and family live, faces removal to another country, nominally ‘theirs’, where they may know nobody and not speak the language. Legally they are members of that other place; functionally they are not.

Since 2010, successive home secretaries have increased the use of citizenship deprivation powers and widened the field of people against whom action can been taken. Citizenship may now be revoked for ‘serious criminality’. So far this has been used against the members of ‘grooming gangs’, transformed into ‘foreign criminals’ who can be sent ‘home’. Public reaction to their removal will often be ‘good riddance’, but once the precedent is established, others, guilty of less heinous crimes, can also be removed.

Defending deportation flights to Jamaica, Javid referred to those being removed as ‘serious criminals’. Many were guilty only of drug or even driving offences yet could be flushed from the system. They had never formally secured British nationality, but some had known no other home than Britain. The extension of citizenship deprivation potentially allows more people to be shifted to the category of the deportable.

The UK is a party to the 1961 Statelessness Convention and bound not to revoke someone’s nationality if they do not have another one to fall back on. In 2014, the Coalition government weakened the protection: naturalised citizens could lose their British nationality if the secretary of state had ‘reasonable grounds’ for believing they were able to acquire the citizenship of another country. Depriving naturalised citizens of their status is not unproblematic, since it divides society into those who hold their membership securely and those who do not. But at least when people naturalised as adults, swearing allegiance to their new state, it could be argued that they went against their word.

The naturalised are a tiny proportion of the citizens of most countries. Like most British citizens, Begum acquired her nationality at birth. In her case, Javid seems to be relying on her already being legally a citizen of Bangladesh, a country she has never visited. The government in Dhaka, however, has said that she is not a citizen and ‘there is no question of her being allowed to enter into Bangladesh.’

If Javid’s decision is not overturned by the courts, the vast majority of citizens, for whom losing their citizenship was literally unthinkable, may need to think again. So who is at risk? Potentially, any UK citizen who also holds the nationality of another state, whether they are aware of it or not. And certainly anyone who is naturalised and whose entitlement to another citizenship excites the ‘reasonable belief’ of the home secretary. Add these groups together and you have an awful lot of people.

Anyone in Northern Ireland who holds Irish nationality could be kicked out if this is believed conducive to the public good. Children whose parents thought it wise to get an Irish or other EU passport after Brexit now carry this hidden vulnerability. Every Jew has the right to Israeli citizenship. The British children of citizens of other EU states may grow up with a hidden nationality that makes it easier to kick them out later. And the same goes for those whose parents came from parts of the former British Empire, as in Begum’s case. You might think the government would never do that, even for ‘serious criminals’, at least if they were white and middle-class and with English ancestors going back a bit. You’d probably be right: those who are singled out to be redesignated as not British and marked for exclusion tend to have a ‘funny tinge’ about them."
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Bang on.

I find it very disturbing that a man can rescind a persons citizenship. I would prefer she stood trial for what ever crimes alleged than set this dangerous fucking precedent.
 
Gorton_Tubster said:
Glad she isn't allowed back, if only to stop the rise of the right who use these things to get support.

It's the right decision over all
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That's a fair point. Can you imagine the amount of frothing in the Daily Mail if she were.
Whilst I can sympathise with the view that no public money should be spent on anyone who voluntarily joined a terror group and declared hatred for the country of their birth and has expressed no remorse, there is still an international law problem. I don't see how we can pick and choose which international laws we should stick to and which ones we can ignore, although this government seems to be getting itself a track record of threatening to ignore international law when it suits.
 
west didsblue said:
That's a fair point. Can you imagine the amount of frothing in the Daily Mail if she were.
Whilst I can sympathise with the view that no public money should be spent on anyone who voluntarily joined a terror group and declared hatred for the country of their birth and has expressed no remorse, there is still an international law problem. I don't see how we can pick and choose which international laws we should stick to and which ones we can ignore, although this government seems to be getting itself a track record of threatening to ignore international law when it suits.
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west didsblue said:
That's a fair point. Can you imagine the amount of frothing in the Daily Mail if she were.
Whilst I can sympathise with the view that no public money should be spent on anyone who voluntarily joined a terror group and declared hatred for the country of their birth and has expressed no remorse, there is still an international law problem. I don't see how we can pick and choose which international laws we should stick to and which ones we can ignore, although this government seems to be getting itself a track record of threatening to ignore international law when it suits.
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I agree with this.

I've no time whatsoever for this woman,but the government have been guilty of playing to the gallery on this matter in my opinion.
 
lust overlord said:
I agree with this.

I've no time whatsoever for this woman,but the government have been guilty of playing to the gallery on this matter in my opinion.
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Why can't she go to Holland the birthplace of her "husband" or Bangladesh the birthplace of her Father.

I suspect they don't want her and she wants to get back to soft touch Britain and the welfare state.

I for one do not want her back the ingrate.
 
Gray said:
Why can't she go to Holland the birthplace of her "husband" or Bangladesh the birthplace of her Father.

I suspect they don't want her and she wants to get back to soft touch Britain and the welfare state.

I for one do not want her back the ingrate.
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Nobody wants her back and no one wants any of the violent criminals who live here already either. Unfortunately for us, like most of the undesirables already here she was born here so under international law we will eventually be stuck with her. Holland and Bangladesh have much better reason for not letting her live in their countries. If one of them would take her that's problem solved but why would they? At some point in the future, if Syria manages to get back to some semblance of normality, their authorities will stick her on a plane to the UK and there's fuck all we can do about it.
 
Gray said:
Why can't she go to Holland the birthplace of her "husband" or Bangladesh the birthplace of her Father.

I suspect they don't want her and she wants to get back to soft touch Britain and the welfare state.

I for one do not want her back the ingrate.
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Because she's British. She was born in Britain and is a British national. That's not to say anything positive or negative about her, it's just a simple fact. She might be guilty of any number of crimes, and morally reprehensible in any number of ways, but that's not the point.
 
KPXBLN said:
Because she's British. She was born in Britain and is a British national. That's not to say anything positive or negative about her, it's just a simple fact. She might be guilty of any number of crimes, and morally reprehensible in any number of ways, but that's not the point.
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It's really as simple as that, and no amount of outrage and indignation can change it.
 
Gray said:
Why can't she go to Holland the birthplace of her "husband" or Bangladesh the birthplace of her Father.

I suspect they don't want her and she wants to get back to soft touch Britain and the welfare state.

I for one do not want her back the ingrate.
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To point out the bleeding obvious, because she is British.
 
Gray said:
Why can't she go to Holland the birthplace of her "husband" or Bangladesh the birthplace of her Father.

I suspect they don't want her and she wants to get back to soft touch Britain and the welfare state.

I for one do not want her back the ingrate.
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What eligibility would she have to enter the Netherlands? Her marriage conducted in Islamic State territory is probably not even recognised. She doesn't speak Bengali, one reason why she might not want to go to a country she has minimal connection with who refuse to acknowledge that she is a citizen. And one which she has no travel documents for.

I wasn't aware expecting people to have a right of appeal and proper representation by means of legal aid was something exclusive to Marxist idealogy.

She should be brought back to face justice in the UK, if there is evidence she has committed crimes, she should be prosecuted. And if convicted jailed.

This young woman is a warning of the future to prospective radicalised child brides, of the misery that will come to them (3 infant deaths etc). But keeping the adults and children in camps in squalor and all together will only radicalise future generations. I hope that I am wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn in the future that men who lived in these camps as children went on to become terrorists.
 
The plight of this young woman breaks my heart.
As a school child she ran away and got herself mixed up with a very undesirable collection of individuals.
Quite correctly she should now answer for any alleged wrongdoing, but the argument that she should somehow lose her citizenship is dangerous, immoral, and legally extremely dubious.

We should be asking ourselves what it is about our society that running away to Syria looked like a better option than staying at home for a vulnerable child.

If she was a white male , running away to Dublin and getting mixed up with a bunch of Provisionals would there be a cry to strip Him of his citizenship? No, of course there wouldn't.

And what of the precedent being set here? What happens when we arrest a foreign national for some heinous crime or other and wish to deport them home if their home nation refuses them citizenship? Do we keep them?

Dog whistle judicial grandstanding with an eye on the Daily Mail, as per usual in this country.

This desperately vulnerable young woman needs to be brought home, looked after, educated on the error of her ways and allowed to eventually live a normal happy life.

This whole episode is a desperately sad state of affairs.
 
I used to work with a guy at Barclays, he was a nice guy friendly and chatty. All of a sudden he turned Islam, he would spend his shifts reading religious literature and evemn try to convert some of us. We didnt mind, he was harmless and accepted that his pov wasnt everyones.

Then 911 happened and we found out he'd been captured in Afghanistan. He was then trasferred to Guantamo Bay and stayed there for five years or so. Massive press campaign to get him released, they said he was just in the country at the wrong time, that the Americans had been over zealous in their capture of foriegn insurgents and were just locking anyone up. When he was release there was a bit of a home coming, he was awarded compensation.

The last time he was seen he was driving a suicide truck into a load of people in some terrorist incident!


We have a responsibility to humankind, we must not let these people fool us into a false sense of security because they'll exploit it as much as they can, whether theyve been groomed or not we should protect the rights of everyone to live in safety, and I believe thats what the law courts have ruled in this case - that society safety trumps human rights of one person.
 
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