Yep exactly. I get people saying that they’re happy with it because in their opinion she doesn’t deserve to have British citizenship anymore. I don’t think that should be the argument or the point though, it’s about our obligations as a country too.
It’s just fundamentally wrong to me that we aren’t taking account for holding her to justice ourselves when everyone else was repatriating people and putting them through their courts rather than leaving them in Syria (or worse still, trying to palm them off to another country like Bangladesh).
There was a time really not that long ago that would have been unconscionable to conservatives too.
It’s the combination of 3 things that make me uncomfortable with this story and to be frank not think much of the people cheering.
1) We know there’s 500+ ISIS fighters and supporters who were waived back in. Why? Their stories weren’t in the press when they left because they weren’t trafficked children and for some of them, simply because they dont have an immigrant background and other potential citizenships. Justice should be applied equally to all not just to those who are infamous or immigrants.
2) We know of multiple people who were accused of being terrorists, got citizenship revoked, were not allowed to see the evidence against them because it was top secret, then after 5+ years of fighting in courts, got their lives back because there was no evidence, or it was mistaken identity. That should worry everyone.
3) We have revoked her citizenship allegedly because she’s a terrorist and a risk to the public. But she’ll never stand trial for it, never get to present a defence to a jury of her peers and never get convicted. I’m old fashioned, I think innocent until proven guilty in a court of law is a good principle. I don’t really like the idea that a random Home Secretary like Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, 2 names Schapps or in this case Sajid Javid can summarily remove that right.
And then of course there’s the fact she was trafficked and raped as a child. I believe in ages of consent, I believe in the concept of statutory rape, so from my perspective we are not just fecklessly washing our hands and dumping a suspected criminal on Syria and the rest of the world, we are abandoning a person who as a child was failed in the worst possible way by this country’s security and social services.
So yeah, I think the appeals court decision was right, but anyone whooping and cheering about the outcome is not someone I wanna know.
