Jeremy Au Yong
Foreign Editor, FEB 24, 2019, The
Straits Times
Was it right of UK to strip teen ISIS sympathiser of her
citizenship?
While we are rather more used to discussing citizenship in
terms of what a government owes to its citizens (a discussion often framed as a
comparison to benefits which foreigners gain), the matter of what obligations a
citizen might have, if any, tends to get less attention. I say "if
any" because it is not immediately obvious that there are any, or that
there is even a consensus on whether there should be.
Shamima Begum was just 15 when she - for reasons that only
she can ever completely comprehend - stole her elder sister's passport, fled
her east London family home and headed to Syria to join ISIS. Almost nothing
was heard from her for four years until she was recently discovered in a
refugee camp in north-eastern Syria, voicing a desire to return to what is
ostensibly her home country. That desire, and the subsequent actions of the
British government to strip her of citizenship last week, made Begum the poster
child of the dilemma countries are facing as they contend with what to do with
citizens who are returning from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Begum is not the first ISIS sympathiser to try and flee, but
with the terror group now a far cry from the organisation that once controlled
a taxable population of some eight million, countries around the world are
bracing themselves for the re-emergence of citizens who previously defected. The
exact numbers are unclear but at least 40,000 fighters from more than 100
countries are thought to have gone to Syria to join ISIS when it declared a caliphate
back in 2014.
With the dream of the caliphate now gone, many countries are
expected to now deal with many trying to get back home. But that return is
posing difficult questions about citizenship and the obligations both citizens
have to their countries and vice versa.
Begum's story has resonated in part because it captures so
much of the nuance of the issue. She doesn't fit any narrative about these
fighters particularly well, yet there is enough about her to provide
justification to nearly any argument one might want to make - the 19-year-old
is something of a Rorschach test on returning ISIS brides.
For those convinced that the United Kingdom was right to
deprive her of citizenship, Begum is a traitor, and a radicalised teen who
married an ISIS fighter and has shown no remorse. In her interviews with
British media, even as she was asking for sympathy, Begum never expressed any
regret about joining the group.
"I feel a lot of people should have sympathy for me,
for everything I've been through. You know, I didn't know what I was getting
into when I left," she told Sky News.
She would even go on to argue that she did nothing wrong.
"When I went to Syria, I was just a housewife, the
entire four years I stayed at home, took care of my husband, took care of my
kids. I never did anything. I never made propaganda, I never encouraged people
to come to Syria," she said.
For those who think the British government should not have
revoked her citizenship, Begum is a misguided teen, now with a newborn, who can
be treated with compassion without sacrificing security.
Tied intricately to this issue is a debate on citizenship
and the obligations of citizens. While we are rather more used to discussing
citizenship in terms of what a government owes to its citizens (a discussion
often framed as a comparison to benefits which foreigners gain), the matter of
what obligations a citizen might have, if any, tends to get less attention. I
say "if any" because it is not immediately obvious that there are
any, or that there is even a consensus on whether there should be.
Those against the idea of a conditional citizenship argue
that it demeans the value of citizenship and is potentially cruel or, if not,
unfair. At the heart of the cruelty argument is the despair inherent in being
stateless. Someone with no citizenship is deprived of some basic citizenship
rights, including many protections that countries confer upon their citizens. The
unfairness argument, in turn, stems from laws enacted that have attempted to
avert the statelessness problem. In some countries, only those who have dual
citizenship can have their citizenship revoked, thus creating on paper a second
class of citizenship that is less durable than the first.
Having citizenship with a catch can also diminish what it
means to be a citizen. As Canadian law academic Audrey Macklin wrote in 2014 in
a paper discussing laws in the UK and Canada on citizenship revocation:
"Citizenship emerges as an enhanced form of conditional permanent
residence, revocable through the exercise of executive discretion."
On the other side is the argument that citizenship should be
revocable because it is an implicit contract. Unlike, say, being a member of a
family, citizenship is not some passive status that imposes no preconditions. This
side doesn't suggest that citizenship can be taken away willy-nilly, but that
there should be extreme scenarios in which someone's right to be a citizen is
nullified. After all, if even families can disown their members, surely a
country can too.
There is also a history of governments either locking away
deviant members for life or imposing capital punishment. Both are examples of
government taking actions that deprive their citizens of their core rights.
If one accepts the idea of a conditional citizenship, then
the question becomes what that condition is. In Begum's case, those who want to
keep her out would argue that treason - giving comfort and aid to an entity at
war with your own country - is a reasonable condition.
I find elements in the arguments of both sides persuasive.
Intuitively, citizenship should be something that comes with
duties. This is not to suggest that the actions most frequently associated with
good citizenry - obeying the laws, paying taxes, voting, doing national service
(in Singapore's case) - need to be prerequisites for citizenship. (A Singapore
male who doesn't pay taxes, doesn't do national service and doesn't vote is
still a citizen - a citizen in jail but a citizen nonetheless.) It is not so
onerous an imposition to expect citizens not to side with the enemy in a
conflict - whether this means taking up arms or simply looking after its
fighters.
At the same time, the idea of a government turning its back
on a citizen in this scenario poses its own set of dilemmas, foremost of which
is the question of who is supposed to deal with the individual. Begum does not
just disappear because her citizenship has been revoked. She has to live
somewhere. The UK, for all its problems, would apparently be equipped to take
Begum back, prosecute her and then punish or rehabilitate her. To respond to
her desire to return by denying she is one of your own comes off as trying to
make her someone else's problem.
If thousands more cases are to come, involving dozens of
countries, that will be quite a number of people who are supposed to be someone
else's problem. The risk this could have in making worse a terrorism problem
that the denationalisation was supposed to fix is significant.
And that seems to be the rub between the conflicting sides
on the citizenship issue.
While there is more than sufficient justification for
unmaking a citizen, it may not always be the right thing to do.
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