General British politics discussion thread

Far from being well represented, Shamima Begum has not been represented in the proceedings at all. As already pointed out, she is not a party to the proceedings.

I note your quote from the Bangladeshi citizenship legislation. But it's hard to reconcile with the Bangladeshi government's statement that she would not be admitted to the country, which is not a position they could adopt if she were a citizen. Perhaps the facts of her birth and descent are not as you think they are, or perhaps there is another relevant provision of the legislation which you don't quote because it hasn't been drawn to your attention.

The question of the soundness or otherwise of the Home Secretary's view that she is entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship has never been considered in the British courts - the proceedings that the Supreme Court rules on were about the Home Secretary's refusal to admit her to the UK so that she could instruct lawyers to challenge that view. As she was not permitted to return she has not instructed lawyers and so court proceedings to challenge the Home Secretary's view have never been instituted.

The issue, for the purposes of this thread, is not whether Begum is or is not deserving of British Citizenship, but whether someone who is stripped of British citizenship by executive action should have an effective right to enquire into the reasons for the decision, to challenge the decision, and to access the courts to establish the lawfulness of the executive's decision. If people who are profoundly affected by their government's decisions don't have these rights, can we say that human rights are adequately protected in the country concerned?

But is there another Bangladeshi law that say's "in the event of X, then a person is not entitled to apply for citizenship". Are you familiar with all Bangladeshi law's ? is the UK ?

Surely the ultimate authority on this would be the Bangladeshi and not the UK.

The rules have to applied equally otherwise the government can bar all sorts of people they don't like and not just the ISIS ones. What if someone joins an anti ISIS group and the government uses this precedent to revoke the citizenship of that person.

I have no problem with her being locked up in either Syria or the UK but offloading her on Bangladesh is BS

I'm in zero doubt you'd have a different tune of it was you child being denied their birth citizenship for whatever reason a home secretary of the day chooses.

It's nonsense you know it's nonsense. There is nothing legitimate about any of it. It actually makes a mockery of the law in the country tbh. And means all laws are there to be toyed with by populists. How someone applauds that is beyond me.

The argument is essentially this; a useful test for how seriously any country takes the concept of human rights is whether and to what extent they afford protection to the rights of people who are unpopular, disliked, etc. For example, we generally accept that there is a right to jury trial and that any criminal, no matter what he has done, is entitled to be tried in a court, to be told the evidence against him, to the presumption of innocence, to fair procedures, etc. And we'd readily accept that a country that didn't do this, or that did this for most people but denied it to Jews, or Muslims, or non-citizens, or any other group, was not respecting basic human rights.

OK. Just as there is a right not to be arbitrarily imprisoned, so there is a right not to be arbitrarily deprived of citizenship. While a country's law can provide for deprivation of citizenship, it must do so on terms which respect human rights (e.g. the law can't provide for you to be deprived of citizenship for being Jewish, say) and it must provide processes by which it can be established that deprivation of citizenship is justified by law, and has been carried out properly - i.e. you have to be able to challenge it in court, find out the reasons for the decision, have an opportunity to challenge those reasons, etc.

Begum was deprived of citizenship by executive action, and there's a strongly arguable case that that was an unlawful action, since (among other reasons) it rendered her stateless, which is a violation of the UK's obligations under the Convention on Statelessness. But, because of a second decision by the executive, she is deprived of any effective opportunity to challenge the first one. Which means she has no effective process to vindicate her human rights.

This presents a problem which can't be obscured with a tirade of personal abuse at Begum. The fact that you don't like Begum, or the fact that she may be a deplorable person, does not mean that she is not human. And if our pretence to value human rights is not entirely hypocritical, we have to assert that the rights even of deplorable people that we don't like have to be protected. And this is a fairly clear case where a combination of UK law and UK executive actions have deprived Begum of any effective opportunity to assert her human rights and have them protected by law. So something is wanting in the standard of human rights protection in the UK.

Well the British government did let a large amount of convicted terrorists walk free because they promised to be good boys and girls so it's not something without precedent.

Is the fact that they are or were members of ISIS not enough to convict them under anti terrorism law anyway so its pretty open shut