Shamima Begum is stuck in a Syrian refugee camp and wants to return to Britain. Photo / ITV
Britain’s Home Secretary has pledged to fight European judges over a fresh attempt by Shamima Begum to return to the United Kingdom.
The European Court of Human Rights has asked Britain to justify stripping Begum of UK citizenship after she ran off to Syria to join Isis a decade ago.
The intervention potentially opens the way for Begum to return and has been hailed by her lawyers as an “unprecedented opportunity”.
Sources said Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood would “robustly defend” the Government’s position, paving the way for a clash with the court.
In 2015 at the age of 15, Begum, from Bethnal Green, east London, ran off to Syria with two school friends to join Isis.
She became a child bride to Yago Riedijk, a Dutch Islamic convert, with whom she had three children, who all died as infants.
A Government source said: “The Home Secretary will robustly defend the decision to revoke Shamima Begum’s citizenship, which has been tested and upheld time and again in our domestic courts. The Home Secretary will always put this country’s national security first.”
The row also fuelled fresh calls for Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which gives the court in Strasbourg its power. The court’s final rulings are technically binding, but there is no enforcement mechanism.
The UK could defy Strasbourg, as former Prime Minister David Cameron did over a ruling on prisoners’ voting rights until he compromised by allowing offenders on licence to vote.
It is not clear whether the Government would defy a final judgment.
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “Under no circumstances should Shamima Begum ever set foot in the UK again. She chose to get into bed with Isis terrorists and must now live with the consequences.
“We don’t need a foreign court in Strasbourg to tell us who can or can’t come into this country. This is yet another glaring example of why we must leave the court and take back control of our borders.
“The Government should defy any attempt by Strasbourg to overturn the original decision.”
In a series of questions to the Government, judges at the European court have asked the UK whether it broke human rights and anti-trafficking laws when Sajid Javid, the then Home Secretary, revoked Begum’s citizenship.
The questions mirror Begum’s key legal argument that she was a victim of grooming and trafficking who should not have been stripped of her citizenship.
She is currently held in the al-Roj detention camp in north-eastern Syria.
Javid took away her British citizenship as she could also claim residency in Bangladesh, meaning that she would not be made stateless in breach of international law.
The decision was upheld by the UK’s Supreme Court, ending any chance that she had of reversing the block on her return through the domestic courts.
The Strasbourg court is now seeking the UK Government’s response to the application by Begum’s lawyers in a “settlement” phase before any potential full hearing of the case.
If Begum’s appeal was upheld, ministers would have to “take account” of any judgment by the court.
Although they could refuse to do so, such defiance would risk causing splits within Labour, which has committed to uphold the ECHR.
The party rejected Tory and Reform UK demands to quit the court, and instead opted to seek to reform it.
Richard Hermer, the Attorney-General, who represented Begum in her legal battle to return to the UK before taking his post, has been one of the Government’s strongest champions of the ECHR and rule of law, but has backed reforms to the applications of articles three and eight to curb their use by migrants in blocking deportations.
Central to the Begum case will be whether the UK acted in breach of Article four of the ECHR, which protects a person’s right not to be held in slavery or servitude.
In a statement on the European court’s decision, Gareth Peirce, Begum’s lawyer at Birnberg Peirce solicitors, said it represented an “unprecedented opportunity” for the UK and Begum to grapple with issues “ignored, sidestepped or violated up to now by previous UK administrations”.
Peirce said it was “impossible to dispute” that Begum was “lured, encouraged, and deceived for the purposes of sexual exploitation”.
There was a “catalogue of failures to protect a child known for weeks beforehand to be at high risk when a close friend had disappeared to Syria in an identical way and via an identical route,” she said.
The Strasbourg court’s questions to the Home Office ask whether Begum had been trafficked to Syria, whether British authorities had failed to protect her, and whether her lack of citizenship would undermine any future investigation into trafficking.
The court asked: “Has there been a violation of the applicant’s rights under Article four of the convention by virtue of the decision to deprive her of her citizenship?”
It also hinted that it was concerned that the Home Office had used its powers to deprive a person of their citizenship as “punishment” in Begum’s case.
It asked: “Was the deprivation of [Begum’s] citizenship analogous to a criminal prosecution? Was it a ‘penalty’ within the meaning of Article 26 of The Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings?”
Article 26 is a legal provision that protects victims from prosecution for crimes that they were forced to do because they were trafficked.
The court highlighted a ruling in 2021, which claimed that the UK had failed to protect two Vietnamese children who were prosecuted for drug offences despite evidence that they were trafficking victims.
Another of the questions asked was: “For the purposes of the Article four complaints made in the application, was the applicant at all material times within the jurisdiction of the UK, within the meaning of Article one of the convention?”
Article one confers an obligation for states to respect human rights.
Officials were also asked: “Did the secretary of state for the home department’s decision to deprive the applicant of her citizenship engage her rights under Article four of the convention?
“Did the secretary of state have a positive obligation, by virtue of Article four of the convention, to consider whether the applicant had been a victim of trafficking, and whether any duties or obligations to her flowed from that fact, before deciding to deprive her of her citizenship?”
Home Office lawyers are expected to argue that the claims over alleged breaches of Article four were tested and rejected in UK courts. When the Supreme Court refused Begum’s appeal, it specifically addressed the question of human trafficking, saying it did “not raise an arguable point of law”.
A Home Office spokesman said: “The Government will always protect the UK and its citizens. That is why Shamima Begum – who posed a national security threat – had her British citizenship revoked and is unable to return to the UK. We will robustly defend any decision made to protect our national security.”
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