Three British-Bangladeshis said to have travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State (IS) have won an appeal against a decision to strip them of their citizenship, after a specialist tribunal found the revocation rendered them stateless.
The group consists of two UK-born women, known only as C3 and C4, who had their British citizenship revoked in November 2019 after being designated a threat to national security. The third, a man known as C7, was born in Bangladesh but became a British citizen at birth. His citizenship was revoked in March 2020 after he was deemed to have “aligned” with IS and was thus a threat to UK national security.
All three appealed to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC), a tribunal that hears challenges to the removal of British citizenship exacted in the “interests of national security or on other related grounds.”
The Home Office justified the removal of the trio’s citizenship, stating that the decision did not render them stateless because they were all dual nationals at the time.
However, the group’s lawyers rebuffed the claims, saying that all three had lost their Bangladeshi citizenship when they turned 21. The Bangladeshi Citizenship Act 1951 states that dual nationality is not permitted and that someone with another citizenship “ceases to be a citizen of Bangladesh” when they turn 21.
Making someone stateless in this fashion violates international law; in the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, of which the UK is a signatory, it states that:
“A Contracting State shall not deprive a person of its nationality if such deprivation would render him stateless.”
In his ruling, Justice Chamberlain said: “C3, C4 and C7 have persuaded us that, on the dates when the decisions and the orders in their cases were made, they were not nationals of Bangladesh or any other state apart from the UK.
This means that orders depriving them of their British citizenship would make them stateless.”
He added that: “The secretary of state had no power to make orders with that effect. For that reason – and that reason alone – the appeals against the decisions to make those orders succeed.”
Following the publication of the SIAC’s ruling, Maya Foa, director of human rights group Reprieve said that:
“This ruling confirms that in the Home Secretary’s rush to abdicate responsibility for these women she broke domestic and international law by rendering them stateless.”
Though comparisons may be made to the case of Shamima Begum, a 15-year-old who left the UK in 2015, the difference outwardly appears to be the claimants’ ages, with Begum under 21 at the time and therefore deemed ‘eligible’ for Bangladeshi citizenship when her claim was denied.
However, in June 2020 Bangladeshi’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs made it clear that she would not be allowed into the country. “The clear position of the government of Bangladesh is British citizen Shamima was never a Bangladeshi citizen,” Adding that,”[Shamima Begum] doesn’t have any rights in this regard and there is no scope to allow her to enter Bangladesh.”
The recent Supreme Court judgement not only leaves Shamima Begum and many others like her in legal limbo, but also paves the way for a two-tiered, and by default, discriminatory citizenship system.