Shamima Begum’s lawyer admitted there’s always the possibility the jihadi bride is a terror threat to the country she escaped for Syria but thinks she should still return to the United Kingdom to fight for her passport.
Tasnime Akunjee spoke out after the Supreme Court heard letting the 21-year-old, who escaped to join ISIS aged 15, to appeal the decision to take away her British citizenship would be an insult to justice.
Tasnime Akunjee told Good Morning Britain that there was always a chance that she was a threat, but that if you compared her situation to the brother of the Ariana Grande concert bomber, Mr Abedi, the British Government spent a lot of time and effort securing him in Libya and extraditing him to the United Kingdom to face trials for 22 counts of murder – he will spend the next 55 years in jail.
He was then asked by Susanna Reid if Begum should return to Britain, even if she posed a threat – he said, the Court of Appeal has been clear that should she return to the United Kingdom the Home Office would impose added constraints on her to mitigate any potential threat.
The 21-year old’s case is being considered by the Supreme Court after her British Citizenship was withdrawn by the then Home Secretary Sajid Javid – it’s deciding whether Begum, presently in the Al Hawl refugee camp in Syria, should be permitted to return to the United Kingdom to appeal against the deprivation of that citizenship.
Britain believes she’s not stateless because people with Bangladeshi parents are given citizenship to the South Asian country upon birth.
The hearing was told she posed a clear and grave threat to national security.
Government lawyer Sir James Eadie QC said that there was no ground for concluding that the risks that she poses could be addressed satisfactorily.
He said that national security would be seriously put at risk and allowing the substantive appeal would represent not an application of justice but an affront to justice.
She was one of three schoolgirls from Bethnal Green Academy who left their homes and families to join the extremists in December 2014 and she lived under ISIS rule for more than three years before she was discovered, nine months pregnant, in a Syrian refugee camp.
If she comes back to fight for her rights, she’ll do it remotely, so why does she need to return? Technically there’s no actual reason for her to return, but her lawyers know that once she sets her feet in Britain, it’ll be impossible to get rid of her.
It will drag on through the courts for years and she will be unable to support herself, and it will be a lovely long term earner for her lawyer.
Her lawyer is being paid to defend her and even he believes she could be a threat and it seems that we’re lost as a fair justice system and quite frankly as a country because no one gives a damn about what happens to the rest of us as long as terrorists, killers and crooks are okay.
