Shamima Begum must face judgement for her crimes in the UK

Editorial: For justice to be served, Ms Begum needs to return home – and for that to take place, she will need her formal citizenship restored

(Dave Brown)

When Shamima Begum, who has lost her latest attempt to regain her British citizenship, left for Isis-occupied Syria to live in what she claims she thought was “paradise”, she was 15 years of age. She had been apparently radicalised and encouraged by friends and propaganda videos, and she was a child. She had been groomed at an impressionable age, trafficked and exploited by a remorseless group of violent zealots. One of the court’s key findings included “credible suspicion” that Ms Begum was recruited, transferred and then harboured for the purpose of sexual exploitation.

Yet due to her crimes, she is still largely considered an unsympathetic figure. Despite her mild celebrification, the podcasts and media interviews and an appearance on a lifestyle magazine cover, she is nobody’s idea of a cover girl for human rights. At the time that she left Britain, she was above the age of criminal responsibility. When she was there, in the Isis "caliphate", she has admitted she knew what was going on (though perhaps not fully).

She was a member of the Isis religious police, the Hisbah, not renowned for their compassionate ways. She says she was OK with beheadings, and that she thought the Manchester Arena bombings were justified as retaliation. She married an Isis fighter – albeit one who was, for a time, in prison on suspicion of being a western spy. Anything else she was involved in seems to be a secret shared by the security services only in closed court. She was surely either a terrorist or a terrorist sympathiser. That is fact.