Almost exactly four years after she was stripped of her citizenship, Shamima Begum’s hopes of returning to the UK have been dealt a bitter blow, with the special immigration appeals commission (Siac) upholding the decision.
It is the latest development – and unlikely to be the last – in a legal fight that Begum’s family began in March 2019, one month after the then home secretary, Sajid Javid, took his controversial decision, shortly after she was found in a refugee camp in north-east Syria.
In February 2020, she lost her initial legal challenge, with respect to preliminary grounds, at the Siac. But Begum had what appeared to be a significant victory in July of the same year when the court of appeal ruled that she should be allowed to return to the UK to challenge the Home Office’s decision to revoke her citizenship, partially overturning the earlier Siac decision.
The government successfully challenged the court of appeal’s ruling, and the supreme court found in 2021 that it was “the home secretary who has been charged by parliament with responsibility for making such assessments”.
That judgment by the supreme court on the preliminary grounds tied the hands of the Siac judges when the substantive issues were eventually heard at a five-day hearing in November last year, according to Begum’s lawyers, Birnberg Peirce.
The senior partner Gareth Peirce said that although in Wednesday’s open judgment – a closed judgment is not being published for national security reasons – Siac found that there was “credible suspicion” that Begum had been trafficked for sexual exploitation, the effect of the supreme court ruling was that the commission’s judges considered themselves unable to contradict the home secretary unless it found a mistake in the decision-making process.
She said: “Reading the factual underpinning of what the commission considers to be made out on Ms Begum’s behalf, you would feel there would be no way that she could not have succeeded in her appeal, but you will equally see repeated as a thread through the judgment how the commission invokes the supreme court’s view that its role was limited and cannot consider the merits of the case – it’s limited to the most narrow grounds of administrative review.”
Begum’s lawyers have 10 days to decide whether to appeal against the Siac decision to the court of appeal but they can only do so on a point of law. A lengthy statement issued by Birnberg Peirce suggested that the lawyers are downbeat about what an appeal could achieve given the circumstances.
It said: “The commission’s hands, it considers, are tied by the alteration by the supreme court of its role – it is no longer allowed to come to its own decisions on the merits of a case as a whole. On the key issues, it must defer to the secretary of state. Once that is accepted, it is hard to see what part an appeal against this draconian decision can play.”
However, outside Field House in central London, where the Siac sits, Daniel Furner, also part of Begum’s legal team, was more bullish. He said: “In terms of the legal fight, that’s nowhere near over. We’re not going into details about exactly what that means at this stage.”
He said they would challenge the decision, but also expressed hope that political pressure would come to bear on the government, in light of the judges’ comments on trafficking and sexual exploitation.
The independent reviewer on terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, said ultimately politics would probably dictate that Begum and other Britons in Syrian refugee camps were repatriated, given steps taken by other countries.
He told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One programme: “I can’t believe the UK is going to be a complete outlier … ultimately it will be a political decision. And you could say that if it’s going to happen, particularly with the children who are now growing up, in a way the sooner you do it the better.”
