David Vance SubstackRead More
It positively reeks of judicial overreach! I’m talking about how the European Court of Human Rights has tossed a lifeline to Syrian based ISIS bride Shamim Begum. Strasbourg’s judges have now demanded the UK Home Office justify stripping her citizenship back in 2019.
This is a calculated slap in the face to UK sovereignty and an insult to every victim of ISIS’s barbarity. Begum, now 26, whines that she’s a trafficking victim deserving of a ticket home. No, she chose her path, and ECHR’s interference could unravel UK national security decisions.
This saga started in 2015. Aged 15, Begum sneaked out of east London with two of her school pals, bound initially for Istanbul and then ISIS-held Syria. She wasn’t kidnapped; she was radicalised and eager.
She chose to marry a Dutch jihadi and she happily lived under a regime that revelled in beheadings, rapes, and the slaughter of innocents. When she was found in a refugee camp in 2019, pregnant and unrepentant, she shrugged off ISIS atrocities, even defending the Manchester Arena bombing. I remember the wave of hostility towards her. We did not want her back.
The then Home Secretary Sajid Javid rightly revoked her citizenship on security grounds. Good riddance. British courts were crystal clear. The Special Immigration Appeals Commission shot down her appeal in 2020 and again in 2023. The Court of Appeal upheld it in 2024, and the Supreme Court slammed the door shut in August. How more clear could OUR courts possibly be? These are British judges, accountable to our laws, prioritising our public safety over her sob stories.
Yet along comes the ECH probing if her rights under anti-slavery and property articles were violated. Property? She’s lucky she’s not in a Syrian jail!
Labour have remained silent on the matter but the Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said : “Under no circumstances should Shamima Begum be allowed back into the UK… We must leave the ECHR to protect our borders.” Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick echoed: “Shamima Begum should never step foot on British soil again. We can’t let a foreign court meddle in our national security.”
And former Security Minister Sir Ben Wallace got it right when he said:
“She went of her own free will… She knowingly and freely joined ISIS… She deserved to lose her citizenship. The cheek of her going through a court system that she and the other terrorists would fundamentally want to destroy isn’t lost on anybody.”
Begum’s lawyers now crow about an “unprecedented opportunity.” Opportunity for what??? To let a potential threat waltz back in? The UK’s new October law plugs loopholes, barring extremists from temporary returns during appeals. But if the ECHR rules against us, it could force our hand, exposing the court’s dangerous grip on Britain.
I suspect Starmer would quite like this. In March 2019, Starmer said the decision to strip Begum of her British citizenship was “wrong”! By 2023, Starmer did a u-turn and publicly backed the Court of Appeal ruling that upheld the removal of Begum’s citizenship, calling it “the right decision” and saying national security “has to come first. He twists in the wind and perhaps he will swing again?
Begum made her bed in the caliphate—let her lie in it. And as for the ECHR, it’s long past time that we left it. British national security isn’t up for debate in Strasbourg.
