Almost exactly four years from being 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 home secretary’s 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 British citizenship, partially overturning the earlier Siac decision. However, the government successfully challenged the court of appeal’s ruling, with the supreme court finding in 2021 that it is “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.
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 law.
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 her 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 the hope that political pressure would come to bear on the government, in light of the judges’ comments on trafficking and sexual exploitation.
“What else this judgment calls out for though is some courage and some leadership from the home secretary to look at this case afresh in light of the clear and compelling factual findings this court has made,” he said.
