After long legal battle with ‘ISIS bride,’ U.K. pushes for power to cancel citizenship without notice

The move comes months after a top British court said that Shamima Begum, the British-born “ISIS bride” who left the country as a teenager to join the Islamic State, will not be allowed to return to the United Kingdom to fight a legal case about the revocation of citizenship.

“Deprivation of citizenship on conducive grounds is rightly reserved for those who pose a threat to the UK or whose conduct involves very high harm,” said the Home Office in a statement, adding that British citizenship is a “privilege” and not a right.

London said that the bill does not give it extra powers to remove citizenship, but legal experts have slammed the legislation for potentially creating situations where people lose their right to return home without being allowed to challenge the decision in court.

“It’s not the kind of transparency in due process that you want,” said Alexander Gillespie, an international law expert at New Zealand’s University of Waikato. “You want these things to be dealt with so that the person has a chance to answer the charges against them.”

While international law provides rights to citizenship, governments can retract it — usually after someone has been convicted of or confessed to a serious offense like terrorism — as long as the person has a second citizenship “to fall back onto,” said Gillespie.

Such punitive measures have been in headlines in recent years, after several Western governments canceled the citizenship of people who had allegedly joined Islamist terrorist groups in the wake of the Arab Spring. Some of these people had complex citizenship situations or multiple passports, leaving countries in disagreement over who should take responsibility.

The British government argued in the Begum case that revoking her British citizenship would not render her stateless as she could obtain citizenship in Bangladesh, where she has family roots. But Begum has not been to Bangladesh and the South Asian country has refused to let her in.

This summer, New Zealand reluctantly took in a 26-year-old woman identified as Suhayra Aden. Aden, who grew up in Australia and New Zealand, allegedly joined the Islamic State as a teenage bride, and later had her Australian passport canceled. Canberra’s decision sparked a diplomatic row with Wellington.

“New Zealand has not taken this step lightly,” New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said of Aden, who had been detained in Turkey. “They are not Turkey’s responsibility, and with Australia refusing to accept the family, that makes them ours.”

Similarly, in 2019, the Donald Trump administration barred Hoda Muthana, a New Jersey-born woman who left the country to marry an ISIS fighter, from returning to the United States. The United States and Muthana were at odds as to whether she was ever a citizen, with the government arguing that her father was an accredited Yemeni diplomat when she was born.

Meanwhile, Muthana’s lawyer released a document that stated the father was no longer a representative of the Yemeni government at the time of Hoda Muthana’s birth.

The issue becomes particularly complex if the people who have their citizenship revoked have young children born elsewhere, who may also lose their right to live in the West.

If governments “actually want to fight radicalization, the best thing to do is bring these people home and de-radicalize them, rather than putting them back to the wind where they will be more angry,” Gillespie said.