Shamima Begum, who had joined the jihadist group Islamic State in Syria from the UK as a teenager and was stripped of her British nationality, is a victim of human trafficking, her lawyers pleaded at a hearing at London.
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Then 15 years old, Shamima Begum had left in 2015 with two friends the United Kingdom, where she was born and raised, for Syria. There, she married a jihadist from the Islamic State organization of Dutch origin, eight years her senior. Detained by a Kurdish militia in the Roj camp in northern Syria, she wants to return to her country to ask to recover her British nationality. She was stripped of it in 2019 for reasons of national security, a case that has become emblematic of the situation of "
ghosts
". But in February, the British Supreme Court refused his return.
Lawyers for the young woman, now 21, told a specialized tribunal, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) on Friday that the Home Office had a legal obligation to determine whether she had been a victim of human trafficking.
"
The counterterrorism unit had suspicions of coercion and control
" around the time Shamima Begum left the UK, said her lawyer, Samantha Knights.
"
Catastrophic
"
conditions of detention
Shamima Begum's lawyers stressed that the Interior Ministry had not examined whether she was "
a child who was trafficked and who remained in Syria for the purposes of sexual exploitation and forced marriage
" . The defense of the ministry noted that, in his interviews, Shamima Begum had never declared to have
been
“
victim of trafficking
”. Shamima Begum also wishes to challenge the deprivation of her British citizenship on the grounds that it made her “
de facto stateless
” and that the decision was procedurally unfair.
His lawyer, Samantha Knights described
his conditions of detention in the Roj camp
as "
catastrophic
" and asked the SIAC to examine new grounds for appealing his deprivation of nationality.
In April, rights-based NGO Reprieve estimated that nearly two-thirds of British women and children detained in camps in northeastern Syria were victims of human trafficking, and denounced their "
Abandonment
" by London.
The NGO estimated that 25 British adults and 34 children remained in the region.