A young British woman who joined ISIS in Syria as a teenager—and is now appealing against the government stripping her of her UK citizenship—deserves special protection because she was trafficked for sexual exploitation, an immigration appeal tribunal has been told.
Shamima Begum, who is now 23, left her home in east London when she was 15 and travelled along with two friends via Turkey to Syria where she married a Dutch jihadi, Yago Riedijk, and had three children, who all died.
Begum, who is living in a refugee camp in Syria, was stripped of her British citizenship on national security grounds by the then-Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, in 2019.
The Home Office maintains Begum poses a threat to national security and is not welcome in Britain.
But her lawyers told the hearing on Monday that because Begum was only 15 when she left Britain, she was effectively a victim of “human trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation.”
Begum and her friends Kadiza Sultana, 16, and Amira Abase, 15, travelled to the Middle East in 2015 but both Sultana and Abase were killed during the ISIS conflict.
Although all three travelled of their own free will, Begum’s lawyer told the hearing they were duped.
Samantha Knights, KC, said, “This case concerns a British child aged 15 who was persuaded, influenced, and affected with her friends by a determined and effective ISIS propaganda machine.”
Knights said, “She was following a well-known pattern by which ISIS cynically recruited and groomed female children, as young as 14, so that they could be offered as ‘wives’ to adult men.”
She said the Home Office had deprived her of citizenship, “without seeking to investigate and determine, still less consider, whether she was a child victim of trafficking, and whether there were failures by public authorities in the UK to prevent her being trafficked.”
Sir James Eadie, KC, representing the Home Office, said in written submissions that MI5 believe she still “poses a risk to national security.”
He said: “This is a case about national security. This is not a case about trafficking.”
Eadie said Begum had only left the ISIS-controlled region because of her fears for her safety “and not because of a genuine disengagement from the group.”
He said: “When she did emerge, and gave multiple press interviews shortly before the secretary of state decided to deprive her of her citizenship, she expressed no remorse and said she did not regret joining ISIL, acknowledging that she was aware of the nature of the group when she travelled.”
Earlier the immigration minister Robert Jenrick declined to comment on the Begum case.
Jenrick told Sky News: “It’s difficult for me to comment, I’m afraid ... I do think as a fundamental principle there will be cases, rare cases … where people do things and make choices which undermine the UK interest to such an extent that it is right for the home secretary to have the power to remove their passport.”
Asked if Britain should be more forgiving of a teenager making a mistake, he replied, “Well, I think you should always have an open mind, but it depends on the scale of the mistake and the harm that that individual did or could have done to UK interests abroad.”
