The naked citizenship is essentially unpleasant

Unlock Free

Roula Khalaf, publisher of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Writers are a working partner and a former conservative minister and minister respectively

It is no secret that the two do not agree on many topics. From immigration to the size of the state, our opinions sit at different ends of the political spectrum.

However, we both believe that British citizenship should confer the same inalienable rights to all those who maintain it; About those of mixed heritage, those that the ancestors were here before the Norman conquest and those who took the oath of the citizenry today. We reject, as essentially racist, the argument that the British born who have double citizenship can be deprived of their British passport, while those who do not have foreign heritage cannot. That is, we believe that once British, always and equally British.

Among the fundamental rights that this citizenship confers is equality before the law and the right to judgment by the jury, until we are all innocent until they are evidenced by guilty. In the words of Lord Palperston: “So also a British subject, on any land, he will be confident that the attention and strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and evil.”

This means protecting the rights of British citizens who respect the law and also the accused of attractive acts. Defense of our rights cannot be abandoned simply because it is politically convenient. Unfortunately, however, this is exactly what the government has chosen to do in the case of Shamima Begum. This vulnerable British citizen, born and raised in the United Kingdom, was prepared at the age of 15 and trafficking to unite in Isis in Syria, where he married strongly and two of his children died. For several years, she has been maintained in captivity without testing, in detention facilities piled up with illness, malnutrition and death, where her third child died, therefore. Surrounded by hostility, violence and suspicion, he is not free to speak openly or claim his case.

Ceratly, Shamima Begum made serious mistakes. But she is our responsibility and no one else. In all normal circumstances, a 15 -year -old girl, radicalized in the United Kingdom and undergoing barbarian treatment, would be considered a victim and also judged by her actions in a domestic court. After all, if their actions were criminal, we must consider the question that Andrew Mitchell, the deputy a few years ago: “Since when was a school too much for the British justice system?”

Begum is not the only British detainee in the northeast of the Syrian prisons that his citizenship has had. Repieve, the legal NGO estimates that there are 25 British families who are currently being held in indefinite arrest, illegal there and, according to the United Kingdom courts, subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment. None has been charged with a crime. Among them are approximately 10 men, 20 women and 35 children, most of them under 10. Their lives are at risk every day they remain in these prisons.

The Kurdish authorities who run the camps have repeatedly requested the United Kingdom to repatient the British. And, regardless of the constitutional rights that these individuals have by virtue of their citizenship, there is a pragmatic security argument to repatriate them, which the United Kingdom only among its allies ignores. Even President Trump has returned to prisoners to the soil of the United States, where dozens of domestic processes have been presented against them.

North -American officials recently stated: “This is a crisis of security and humanitarian that worsens the day. The detention facilities are key objectives isis and … the camps are very insecure.” They continued to identify “the only lasting solution”: for the countries to “rehabilitate, rehabilitate, refund and, where appropriate, pursue their nationals”.

A recent report from a parliamentary group of the cross part concluded that the refusal to repatriate British and the use of citizenship spending was “an irresponsible abdication of our responsibility, contributes to instability in the region and creates future security risks.” The Mixed Human Rights Committee of both commons and lords warned this week of “a serious lack of transparency and supervision”, as well as excessive use, of the naked citizenship of the United Kingdom.

The United Kingdom is rightly proud of equality, the defense of the rule of law and the principles of the process because it goes back to great letter. However, abandoning these British families in the camps, undressing them of their citizenship and allowing them to remain in arrest, we guarantee that there will be no legal process, no responsibility or justice.

Avoiding our international responsibilities is also essentially unpleasant, which is why we need to urgently repatiate Begum and the other British of Northeastern Syria, why we must use to protect innocent British children and identify victims of human trafficking and to bring processes, where appropriate, to the soil of the United Kingdom and according to the United Kingdom Law.

We have some of the most detailed anti -terrorist by -laws in the world. Surely it is not beyond the courts of the United Kingdom to ensure, as our allies have done, that justice in the case of this small number of people, including children, is done?