Shamima Begum

[blueinsa]

All Hail the Moggster pmsl.

 

[Alan Harper's Tash]

I assume Mogg was hacked.

 

[RadcliffeRick]

Lost yet another appeal. Who is funding all the legal costs, it must be in the millions by now?

 

[mexico1970]

Cracking news after what was a shit week.

 

[Gray]

Lost yet another appeal. Who is funding all the legal costs, it must be in the millions by now?

She is doing it on Legal Aid so we are paying for it, see the Sunday Telegraph article below.

In the post-war period, Britain has been a lenient country, a country of second chances, policing by consent, a gentle approach to the destitute and, increasingly, an insanely generous blindness towards bad actors – so long as those bad actors are minorities (except for Jews).

We have let terrorists out of prison before serving their full sentence, some of whom have gone on to murder. We treat asylum-seeking young men chancing it by the thousands on small boats to perpetual stays in hotels that many legal residents could never afford, without subjecting them to any meaningful vetting.

And yet even we have lines that can’t be crossed. In leaving for Syria, aged 15 and in full possession of her faculties to join Islamic State (IS), a killing machine of global ambition every bit as bad as Hitler’s Nazis, Bethnal Green’s Shamima Begum forfeited her right to British citizenship and the rights that entails. In Syria, evidence suggests she cheered on her new nation’s sprees of mass executions, torture and rape. She swore allegiance to a terrorist enemy army with the explicit aim of destroying the West, including the UK, and replacing it with a nightmarish caliphate. Yet Begum had received nearly £250,000 in taxpayer-funded legal aid, which could have risen to millions with all her appeals.

Well, last week the Supreme Court refused to hear another appeal from Begum, who had her citizenship stripped in 2019, after she was deemed by the then-home secretary Sajid Javid to be a threat to national security.

In February, the Court of Appeal ruled the government was allowed to block Begum’s return to the UK to argue her citizenship case in person. “I won’t go into details of the case, but what I will say is that you certainly haven’t seen what I saw,” Javid had said. “If you did know what I knew, because you are sensible, responsible people, you would have made exactly the same decision – of that, I have no doubt.”

So it’s no dice for the IS bride in Britain. You have to hand it to her, though, for trying to spin herself as someone who, if allowed back in with her citizenship restored, could, as she said in 2021, “very much help you in your fight against terrorism because you clearly don’t know what you’re doing”.

Her apologies – like the creepily, smoothly vacuous self-presentation we saw in the BBC documentary, filmed in the Syrian refugee camp in which she has lived since IS fell – are singularly unconvincing “sorry-not-sorries”. “I am so sorry if I ever offended anyone by coming here, if I ever offended anyone by the things I said,” she wheedled.

The UK’s rejection hasn’t put her off though. Next stop: Strasbourg, and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).

And, as an embodiment of all that is wrong with the modern Western conceptions of human rights – namely that the rights of terrorists, would-be terrorists and their sympathisers end up outweighing those of non-terrorists and other innocent folk to live without fear of murder – the ECtHR is just the place for her to go. It’s also a reminder of why Britain really ought to break away from the European Convention on Human Rights, full stop (though certainly won’t under Starmer).

There is a long history and rich body of work critiquing the idea of “human rights”. Perhaps most famously, philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, observing the floods of stateless people that grew up between the end of the first and second world wars, that “human rights” is a meaningless term in a world in which only nation states are the guarantors of rights and the protection of people – the human herself does not, cannot, float above the nation state, rightly or wrongly.

Less theoretically, the European Convention on Human Rights, to which the UK is a signatory, is a known obstacle to the swift and just dealing with terrorists, and indeed who we allow in or out of our country. The ECtHR stopped our now-kiboshed Rwanda plan for asylum seekers with a single judge blocking the flight bound for Africa at the eleventh hour.

And as Ben Wallace noted, shortly after leaving his post as defence secretary in 2023, human rights laws are “lunacy” when it comes to protecting the nation from terrorists.

“When we have a threat to the UK, this lunacy of being unable to render people across borders or arrest people in countries whose police forces are unacceptable, means that we are more often than not forced into taking lethal action than actually raiding and detaining,” he said.

Wallace noted that the UK, bound by the ECtHR, could not have raided Osama bin Laden’s villa as the US did. “If there was an IS plot in some Central African country for example, under international law we have the right to take action with or without permission from the host nation, but we couldn’t capture the bad guys – we could only kill them.”

This is the system of justice that mainstream respectable opinion in Britain insists we don’t question, that to pull away from it would render us a pariah state of anarchy and violence. But in remaining bound by the European framework, we show our submission to its governing ideology of pernicious moral relativism. On the broadest level, too many are left to get away with conspiring against us, from within and without, while on the streets, law and order feels patchy, at best, often two-tier in appearance and is clearly overstretched, leading to brazen criminality. That’s where the road to anarchy lies, not in pulling free of a band of obstructive officials in Strasbourg.

If Shamima Begum gets herself back to Britain through the ECtHR, nobody sensible will be surprised, and the perverse – an increasingly large number – will celebrate.

 

[domalino]

Lost yet another appeal. Who is funding all the legal costs, it must be in the millions by now?

I find it really weird that people suddenly want to take away the right to a free legal defence because they found out a bad person is getting it.

 

[domalino]

I logged on to say the same thing. It really comes to something when it takes Rees-Mogg to remind everyone of very basic principles of constitutional liberalism.

It's actually a very good article, nicely summarises why keeping one person out of the country isn't worth undermining the rights of 10 million Britons. Will be interesting what the reaction is from the right.

Also a reminder that JRM is an intelligent man, and the "haunted victorian pencil" character he's played up to is a way of hiding some of his own very nasty ideas behind being "old fashioned"

 

[Gray]

I find it really weird that people suddenly want to take away the right to a free legal defence because they found out a bad person is getting it.

The trouble is good people can't get it.

 

[Kazzydeyna]

This country made her. This country owns her. And owes her.

Let her live the rest of her life in peace and quiet, the poor desperate young kid.

 

[Mr Kobayashi]

In the post-war period, Britain has been a lenient country, a country of second chances, policing by consent, a gentle approach to the destitute and, increasingly, an insanely generous blindness towards bad actors – so long as those bad actors are minorities (except for Jews).

Just a very weird thing to write. Makes reading the rest of the article pointless as we know it's just opinion and not fact based.