ISIS bride Shamima Begum will find out TODAY if is allowed back into the UK

Jihadist bride Shamima Begum will learn today if she has won a legal battle to claim her British citizenship, as a minister insisted she “clearly poses a threat”.

Defense Minister Johnny Mercer said he was confident the judges would reach the “correct conclusion” on the appeal against the revocation of citizenship.

Begum was 15 when she and two other schoolgirls from east London traveled to Syria to join ISIS in February 2015.

Her British citizenship was revoked on national security grounds by then Home Secretary Sajid Javid shortly after she was found, nine months pregnant, in a Syrian refugee camp in February 2019.

Since then, the 23-year-old has been locked in a legal battle with the government, recently challenging the Home Office in the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) over the decision.

Mr. Justice Jay is due to deliver the decision on the case by 10 am this morning.

Ms Begum’s British citizenship was revoked on national security grounds by then Home Secretary Sajid Javid shortly after she was found nine months pregnant in a Syrian refugee camp in February 2019.

In a round of interviews this morning, Mr Mercer said the question of whether Ms Begum should be allowed to return to the UK was “a decision for the Home Secretary and previous Home Secretary”.

“Certainly, Sajid Javid, when he was Minister of the Interior, made the decision to revoke his citizenship. That is their decision,’ he said.

Of course she clearly represents a threat. But there is a lot of information in that case that is not in the public domain.

I don’t think it’s worth discussing in public. I believe that such decisions are made in the courts and in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and I am sure that they will come to the right conclusion.

During a five-day hearing in November, Ms Begum’s lawyers said the Home Office had a duty to investigate whether she was a victim of trafficking before stripping her of her British citizenship.

The specialized court heard that she was “recruited, transported, transferred, harbored and received in Syria for the purposes of ‘sexual exploitation’ and ‘marriage’ to an adult male.”

At an earlier hearing in February 2020, SIAC ruled that the decision to strip her of British citizenship was legal as Ms Begum was a “Bangladeshi citizen by descent” at the time of the decision.

Defense Minister Johnny Mercer said he was confident the judges would reach the “correct conclusion” on the appeal against the revocation of citizenship.

However, her lawyers said in November that the decision made Ms Begum ‘de facto stateless’, where she had no practical right to citizenship in Bangladesh, and the Bangladeshi authorities stated that they would not allow her to enter the country.

Lawyers for the Interior Ministry defended the government’s decision, arguing that people trafficked to Syria and brainwashed may still be threats to national security, adding that Ms Begum expressed no remorse when she initially left the territory controlled by ISIS.

Sir James Eadie KC, of ​​the department, said there was “no ‘credible suspicion’ that she was a victim of trafficking or at real and immediate risk of being trafficked prior to her journey from the UK.”

Sir James said then Home Secretary Javid took into account Ms Begum’s age, how she traveled to Syria, including likely online radicalisation, and her activity in Syria in making the decision to strip her of British citizenship.

It added that the Security Services “continue to assess that Ms. Begum poses a risk to national security.”

The sentence will be pronounced at 10 in the morning.