A case challenging the UK government’s decision to revoke the citizenship of Shamima Begum is now under scrutiny by Europe’s top human rights court, which is examining whether British authorities failed to consider obligations relating to child trafficking before acting.
According to Sky News, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is asking via a set of questions formally put to the UK government, whether officials should have assessed if Begum had been a victim of trafficking under Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits slavery and forced labour, prior to stripping her of citizenship.
Begum left the UK a decade ago, when she was 15, travelling from Bethnal Green in east London to territory controlled by the so-called Islamic State.
She was later married to an IS fighter and remains in a detention camp in Syria. One of her children died there in 2019, before the British government’s citizenship decision.
A case challenging the UK government’s decision to revoke the citizenship of Shamima Begum is now under scrutiny by Europe’s top human rights court, which is examining whether British authorities failed to consider obligations relating to child trafficking before acting.
According to Sky News, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is asking via a set of questions formally put to the UK government, whether officials should have assessed if Begum had been a victim of trafficking under Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits slavery and forced labour, prior to stripping her of citizenship.
Begum left the UK a decade ago, when she was 15, travelling from Bethnal Green in east London to territory controlled by the so-called Islamic State.
She was later married to an IS fighter and remains in a detention camp in Syria. One of her children died there in 2019, before the British government’s citizenship decision.
The UK revoked her citizenship in 2019, arguing that she posed a threat to national security. She has since been barred from returning to Britain to contest the move in person.
Her final appeal against the decision was rejected by the UK Supreme Court, after which the case was lodged with the Strasbourg court in December last year.
According to a document published by the ECHR earlier this month, Begum is arguing that the UK breached Article 4 by failing to recognise and act upon indicators that she may have been trafficked as a minor.
Among the questions directed to the Home Office, the court asked: “Did the Secretary of State have a positive obligation, by virtue of Article 4 of the Convention, to consider whether the applicant had been a victim of trafficking, and whether any duties or obligations to her flowed from that fact, before deciding to deprive her of her citizenship?”
Her legal representatives, Birnberg Peirce Solicitors, said the court’s intervention marked a significant moment in the case.
The firm described the proceedings as an “unprecedented opportunity” for both the UK and Begum to “grapple with the significant considerations raised in her case and ignored, sidestepped or violated up to now by previous UK administrations”.
Gareth Peirce, the solicitor acting for Begum, argued that the circumstances of her departure from the UK amounted to exploitation.
She said it is “impossible to dispute that a 15-year-old British child” was “lured, encouraged and deceived for the purposes of sexual exploitation to leave home and travel to IS-controlled territory for the known purpose of being given, as a child, to an IS fighter to propagate children for the Islamic State”.
Peirce also criticised what she described as failures by authorities prior to Begum’s departure.
“It is equally impossible not to acknowledge the catalogue of failures to protect a child known for weeks beforehand to be at high risk when a close friend had disappeared to Syria in an identical way and via an identical route,” she said.
Referring to the 2019 decision by then home secretary Sajid Javid, Peirce added: “It has already been long conceded that the then home secretary, Sajid Javid, who took the precipitous decision in 2019 very publicly to deprive Ms Begum of citizenship, had failed entirely to consider the issues of grooming and trafficking of a school child in London and of the state’s consequent duties.”
Peirce noted that the UK government has since made the protection of victims of grooming and trafficking a stated national priority.
The ECHR’s examination does not determine whether Begum will be allowed to return to the UK, but focuses instead on whether the British state fulfilled its human rights obligations when it removed her citizenship.
THE THIRD FORCE
