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While many aspects of UK political polling have shifted drastically since 2019, the public’s view on Shamima Begum has remained largely fixed: a big majority do not want the now 26-year-old woman back in the UK.
In 2019, Sajid Javid, then home secretary, stripped the Londoner of her UK citizenship on the grounds that she was a security threat, having travelled as a schoolgirl with two friends to territory controlled by Islamic State (IS) in Syria. At the time, 76% of people backed the move.
Fast-forward to November 2025, and an equivalent poll found two-thirds of people thought Begum should not be allowed back to the UK.
In policy terms, therefore, responding to the European court of human rights’ intervention in the matter should be a no-brainer for the Home Office. This week, media briefings suggested Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, would “robustly” push back against the court after it questioned whether the UK should have considered if Begum – who left the country aged 15 – had been trafficked before it left her stateless in a Syrian camp.
It is not, however, a subject that ministers can simply ignore, for two reasons in particular.
The first is that Begum is not alone. In November, a report into counter-terrorism by a commission of senior UK lawyers said the government’s refusal to repatriate most of the several dozen Britons still living in camps for former IS members and their families was becoming “untenable”.
It said that between 55 and 72 people with links to the UK remain in the camps, among them about 30 to 40 children, living in “inhuman” and often dangerous conditions, and added that other countries have already taken action on the issue.
The second reason – for all that Mahmood might dismiss it – is that the human rights court might have a point.
Even if one was to argue that the 15-year-old Begum was old enough to understand the implications of seeking out a self-styled global caliphate that has carried out numerous and atrocious rights abuses, the UK has never sought to hold her to account.
Nor has it sought to take responsibility for the actions of someone who, when she left the UK, was entirely a product of her home country.
Begum’s case also highlights another political quandary, which is not currently high on the list of voters’ concerns, but has potentially huge repercussions: what does it mean for the rights of Britons who have migrant heritage?
Ministers were able to strip Begum of her UK citizenship only because they said she was entitled to Bangladeshi nationality through her parents. Bangladesh, however, has rejected this. Citizenship cannot be revoked if it leaves someone stateless, meaning Begum’s fate would have been impossible for an equivalent Briton without an overseas background.
The bar for losing UK nationality is set high. It can only happen if citizenship was acquired fraudulently, or if removing it is “conducive to the public good”. Home Office guidance specifies this as meaning the affected person is connected to serious organised crime, terrorism or war crimes.
It is for these reasons that the Home Office concluded it could not revoke the citizenship of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, the British-Egyptian activist who was granted the status while in prison in Egypt in 2021, owing to his mother’s birth in the UK. He came to Britain on Boxing Day, despite the emergence of social media posts including one in which he talked about the need to kill “colonialists” and “Zionists”.
Nonetheless, both the Conservatives and Reform UK have argued for Abd el-Fattah to be deported and to lose his UK citizenship, indicating that a future government might use the sanction more widely against dual nationals, or those from migrant backgrounds, even if they have not necessarily broken the law.
The dispute ties into wider arguments about migration – an area where Keir Starmer’s government has faced accusations of trying too hard to placate voters tempted by Reform, at the cost of losing potential voters on the other side of the political divide to the Liberal Democrats and Greens.
Robert Ford, a professor of political science at Manchester University, said it was possible for ministers to make a wider argument about the importance of citizenship as a right, should they want to tackle the issue head on.
“If the government wanted to reverse the Shamima Begum case, they should do so on the grounds that if [British] citizenship is not a safe status for her; it’s not a safe status for anyone,” he said. “Would you like it if Nigel Farage revoked your citizenship because Israel grants your citizenship, or because you have Irish grandparents?
“Citizenship is an unrestricted, unrevokable, irreversible right and status, or it is nothing, that is how you would argue for it.”
However, Ford added that, while this was a plausible general argument to make, the example of Begum was unlikely to be the best way to advance it.
“I say this as someone who thinks the government has erred a great deal by not adopting principled positions and [by] chasing the polling too much, but even with that in mind, the Shamima Begum case is a difficult one,” he said.
“It will never be a popular thing to do because, although one can frame the issue as one of trafficking, this is somebody leaving the country to go and join IS, which is never going to be a popular cause.”
