{"id":1006124,"date":"2023-02-26T18:51:44","date_gmt":"2023-02-26T18:51:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/uk-news\/2023\/feb\/26\/the-real-scandal-of-the-shamima-begum-citizenship-case"},"modified":"2023-02-26T18:51:44","modified_gmt":"2023-02-26T18:51:44","slug":"the-real-scandal-of-the-shamima-begum-citizenship-case-letters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/02\/26\/the-real-scandal-of-the-shamima-begum-citizenship-case-letters\/","title":{"rendered":"The real scandal of the Shamima Begum citizenship case | Letters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Former supreme court justice <strong>Jonathan Sumption<\/strong> on last week\u2019s ruling on the home secretary\u2019s decision to deprive Begum of her citizenship. Plus letters from<strong> Ilina Todorovska, Owen Stewart, Andrew Snowdon <\/strong>and <strong>Carmel Bedford<\/strong><\/p><p>Prof Conor Gearty complains about the special immigration appeals commission\u2019s \u201cdeference\u201d to the government in its judgment on Shamima Begum (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2023\/feb\/23\/shamima-begum-courts-government-human-rights-national-security\" title=\"\">Shamima Begum has shown up courts\u2019 deference to this government. It\u2019s a worrying new era, 23 February<\/a>). Decisions on deprivation of citizenship are required by statute to be made by the home secretary. The commission\u2019s job was therefore to decide whether the home secretary\u2019s decision was properly made, not whether it agreed with it. That is what it did. In a democracy governed by the rule of law, Prof Gearty should not have been surprised.<\/p><p>Meanwhile, his analysis distracts attention from the real scandal. By statute, the home secretary cannot deprive a person of British citizenship if it would render them stateless. The person must have citizenship of at least one other country. When the decision was made, in 2019, Ms Begum was 19. She was a citizen of Bangladesh, but only in the most technical sense. She had provisional citizenship until she was 21, when it would lapse unless she took it up. This was because her parents were born there. But she has never been to Bangladesh. She has no links with the country. And Bangladesh has disowned her. Her Bangladeshi citizenship always was a legal fiction. Today, it is not even that. She is 23. As a result of the home secretary\u2019s decision, she is stuck in a camp in Syria, with no citizenship anywhere and no prospect of one. Children who make a terrible mistake are surely redeemable. But statelessness is for ever.<\/p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/uk-news\/2023\/feb\/26\/the-real-scandal-of-the-shamima-begum-citizenship-case\">Continue reading...<\/a>\n<p class=\"syndicated-attribution\">This post was originally published on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/uk-news\/2023\/feb\/26\/the-real-scandal-of-the-shamima-begum-citizenship-case\">Human rights | The Guardian<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Former supreme court justice Jonathan Sumption on last week\u2019s ruling on the home secretary\u2019s decision to deprive Begum of her citizenship. Plus letters from Ilina Todorovska, Owen Stewart, Andrew Snowdon and Carmel BedfordProf Conor Gearty complains ab&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13838,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3177,6,4834,9368,640,1258,14,9163,57767,196,1314,3178],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006124"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13838"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1006124"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1006125,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006124\/revisions\/1006125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1006124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1006124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1006124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}