LONDON — Who is Shamima Begum? It depends on whom you speak to.
To some, Begum — the East London schoolgirl who joined the Islamic State group in Syria and now wishes to return home — is a groomed child, indoctrinated by predatory men, a young mother in urgent need. To others, she is a terrorist cheerleader, an unrepentant participant in the destruction of a nation, who deserves everything she gets.
For all the debate over what she is, the U.K. Home Office has decided what she is not: As of this week, Shamima Begum is no longer a British citizen.
Her story has caught the public’s attention. But she is also just one of a growing number of Britons to have had their U.K. nationality revoked over the past few years by an obscure executive power that allows the government to remove citizenship without judicial oversight.
When I started investigating this so-called royal prerogative power in 2013, its use was sparing. Successive immigration acts, signed in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks and the 7/7 London bombings, allowed ministers to revoke an individual’s citizenship if they were deemed “seriously prejudicial to the public good.”
Home Secretary Sajid Javid admitted that around 150 Britons have had their citizenship removed since 2010.
Although the power was criticized by human rights groups, it could only be used on dual-national Britons — that is, the U.K. couldn’t revoke someone’s citizenship if it left them stateless.
That changed in 2014, when the coalition put forward the Immigration Act, which critics argued created two tiers of British citizen: those somehow inalienably more British because they were born in the country and counted only Britons among their immediate ancestry, and those who could be targeted by the law because they were either naturalized or came from non-British lineage.
Begum, with her Bangladeshi heritage, falls into the latter camp. And she is far from alone, as became obvious when Home Secretary Sajid Javid admitted that around 150 Britons have had their citizenship removed since 2010.
The government argues that because Begum could apply for Bangladeshi citizenship in future, she isn’t technically stateless. This is hard to take seriously. It would be analogous for the government to demolish your house, then deny it had made you homeless because you could theoretically build another. As one leading legal expert put it in 2014 when the law passed: “Statelessness is not about options or eligibility, but about the facts here and now.”
Statelessness has been likened to “medieval exile” and a tactic “beloved of the world’s worst regimes.” The British government is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which entitles each human to citizenship and the freedoms and protections it bestows. Yet the government repeatedly wheels out the falsehood that “citizenship is a privilege not a right.” Citizenship is neither a privilege nor a right; it is rather “a state under which an individual is afforded rights.”
Home Secretary Sajid Javid outside 10 Downing Street last November | Leon Neal via Getty Images
As a citizen, even one accused of serious crimes, it is your right to receive a fair trial, access legal counsel, know the charges against you, and avoid cruel and unusual punishment. As a “citizen of nowhere,” to borrow a phrase from Theresa May, you have no rights at all.
It bears repeating that at the time an individual is stripped of their nationality they are to the letter of the law innocent. Prerogative power is executive, and while the accused have a de facto right to appeal to the judiciary, such recourse is rarely used (since the suspect is normally outside the U.K. when the order is given) and even more rarely used successfully (since the evidence against them is kept secret).
It could be that these people are guilty of serious crimes. That is, after all, the Home Office’s argument, though we must trust them on the evidence. The government can use the “royal prerogative” when ministers suspect a citizen of terror-related offences, or believe they acquired their nationality fraudulently, but it requires no trial or conviction in order to take effect.
But aside from the human rights aspect — individuals involved have little or no habeas corpus protections — citizenship-stripping raises more security concerns than it purports to solve.
Police officers pay their respects to victims of the Manchester Arena bombing, a terror attack in 2017 carried out by a radical Islamist | Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images
If the government believes its citizens to be dangerous terrorists, does it not have an obligation to prosecute and, if guilty, punish them? Its current approach is tantamount to cutting them loose abroad and leaving other countries to deal with the grave risks they allegedly pose.
Citizenship-stripping and statelessness run contrary to nearly every international legal, human rights, and security and moral norms. Yet several countries have in recent years followed Britain’s lead to adopt such powers.
The process cuts to the heart of what it means to be a citizen, of Britain or anywhere. Do we believe that under the law all citizens should be treated equally, regardless of race or background? I believe most people — certainly most politicians — would say yes.
The rights and responsibilities of citizenship cut both ways. Does a country like Britain really bear no culpability for a young woman who was born, raised and ultimately indoctrinated within its borders? As Begum’s case so starkly highlights, the government believes the answer to this to be: It depends on your background.
A schoolgirl with solely British heritage who traveled to Syria to join a group responsible for terrible atrocities would, under the government’s own legal justification, still be British today. Shamima Begum isn’t. Irrespective of how we view the young woman, that’s a dual-standard that should concern us all.
Patrick Galey is a journalist and writer who investigated the U.K.’s citizenship-stripping program between 2013 and 2014. He broke the news that the government was stripping the citizenship from British nationals who traveled to join the conflict in Syria.