U.K. Court Upholds Ruling Stripping Shamima Begum’s Citizenship

An immigration court in London has upheld a 2019 decision by the British government to strip citizenship from Shamima Begum, whose case has been the subject of intense debate after she left the country in 2015 and traveled from London to Syria with two friends to join the Islamic State terrorist group.

The decision on Wednesday, made by a special immigration tribunal and read out in court, comes after Ms. Begum appealed the Home Office’s citizenship ruling in 2019, which essentially left her stateless. In 2021, she petitioned unsuccessfully to be allowed to travel to Britain from Syria to challenge that decision in person.

Ms. Begum’s case set off a fierce debate in Britain after a reporter with The Times of London found her in February 2019 in a refugee camp in Syria, where she told him that she wanted to return home. After the newspaper published her story, the British home secretary at the time, Sajid Javid, revoked her citizenship, citing national security risks. In the years since her disappearance and subsequent re-emergence in Syria, the British media has intensely debated the ramifications of her decision to join the terrorist group.

The tribunal on Wednesday did not rule on whether Ms. Begum should be allowed to return to Britain, only on whether her citizenship should be reinstated.

Ms. Begum, now 23, left her home in East London in February 2015 and traveled to Syria with two friends, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, when they were all 15 or 16. Images of the teenagers passing through security barriers at Gatwick Airport, near London, quickly came to be seen as a stark warning about how ISIS was using the internet to recruit young Westerners.

Ms. Begum lived for more than three years in territory controlled by ISIS. In that time, she married a Dutch fighter and had three children, all of whom have since died.

As an American-backed coalition ousted the Islamic State from the territory where Ms. Begum lived in Syria, she and thousands of other family members of ISIS fighters ended up at a refugee camp, Al Hol. It was there in 2019 that the British reporter, Anthony Loyd, recognized her accent and realized that she was one of the runaway girls.

The fate of the other two girls is unclear. Both married Islamic State fighters and had been in contact with their families for some time after arriving in Syria. But the families of both Ms. Abase and Ms. Sultana have told British news outlets that they believe the girls were killed in strikes.

In an early interview, Ms. Begum appeared unrepentant and said that she did not regret joining the Islamic State in Syria. She was swiftly and widely condemned by the British news media before Mr. Javid announced the plans to revoke her citizenship.

This year, the BBC aired a three-part documentary and a podcast about Ms. Begum, produced by the journalist Josh Baker, who has followed her story for years. That documentary reignited discussion about her, again casting the broader denunciations of the terrorist group onto Ms. Begum as its proxy.

But experts in international citizenship laws and rights advocates maintain that the revocation of Ms. Begum’s citizenship could have broader implications. They also cited as mitigation the fact that she had been groomed and coerced into joining the group while still a teenager.

Critics said that Mr. Javid had used Ms. Begum’s case to score political points at a time when the leadership of the Conservative Party, Britain’s governing party at the time, was in question, only months before Prime Minister Theresa May’s resignation in May 2019. Mr. Javid later wrote in an opinion article published in The Sunday Times that he would not hesitate to use so-called deprivation powers to strip the citizenship of any Briton who joined the Islamic State.

During the appeal hearing in November, Ms. Begum’s lawyers maintained that she had been trafficked for sexual exploitation. In August, a BBC investigation revealed that she had been smuggled into Syria by a Canadian intelligence agent. Despite that, the Home Office said that Ms. Begum was still a threat to national security.

“You can still be a risk of setting off a bomb in London or in Manchester,” James Eadie, a lawyer representing the Home Office, told the court in November 2022, according to the BBC. “Even if you have been trafficked at a young age.”

In written evidence given during the hearing, Richard Barrett, a former director of counterterrorism at MI6, the British equivalent of the C.I.A., and Paul Jordan, a senior figure at the nonprofit European Institute of Peace, said that the claim that Ms. Begum posed a national security risk was “superficial and inadequate.”

More generally, they said in a joint statement delivered to the court last year, refusing to repatriate British nationals from northern Syria was “likely to be significantly more dangerous in the medium to long term than repatriating them and subjecting them to prosecution, rehabilitation and reintegration.”

Maya Foa, the director of Reprieve, a British legal nonprofit, said in a statement that most British women who had joined the Islamic State in Syria were groomed, coerced or deceived by ISIS fighters as part of a “sophisticated trafficking gang.” Reprieve’s own investigations have found extensive abuses and concluded that the British approach to repatriation was out of step with that of other Western allies.

Many of the women were girls at the time they were trafficked, Ms. Foa said, and were held against their will and subjected to sexual and other forms of exploitation.

“While this case will not determine whether Shamima Begum can return to the U.K., it should force the government to face the facts: Begum was groomed online as a child and taken to Syria by a Canadian intelligence spy,” Ms. Foa said in a statement. “She should be protected as a trafficked British teenage girl would be in any other context.”