A mother with three children (anonymized as U3) has lost her appeal in a judgment of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) against her deprivation of British Citizenship. The case before the SIAC was the open judgment of U3 v The Secretary of State for the Home Department SC/153/2018 & SC/153/2021 and it involved a dual national of both the UK and Morocco having her British Citizenship stripped from her despite suffering heinous abuse at the hands of her husband.
U3 grew up in the UK and married her husband (anonymized as O) at the age of 18. She became a mother at the age of 19 and then, at 21, crossed from Turkey into IS controlled territory with her children and husband. She had a third child in Syria. As a result of this, and her perceived threat to national security, then Home Secretary Amber Rudd deprived her of her British Citizenship as she was assessed to be aligned with IS. This was one of 104 deprivations of citizenship that Amber Rudd made that year. Her children, however, were allowed back into the UK in 2019 but Priti Patel, current Home Secretary, maintained the decision regarding U3 herself.
The tragic aspect of this case is that U3 did not travel to Syria voluntarily. She was not aligned with IS and she was in fact forced to go there by her abusive and controlling husband. Her account was supported but an expert psychologist and two radicalisation experts. The SAIC accepted that U3 had suffered punching, kicking, violent intercourse, being beaten while pregnant, being beaten in front of relatives, being beaten to the point of hospitalisation, and being beaten specifically because she refused to go to Syria with her husband in March and June 2014. This was also supported by police records.
U3 gave evidence that she only went to Turkey to “save her marriage” and that she did not expect to actually go to Syria from Turkey with her husband because she knew that her husband was banned from Turkey. She argued that this would show him that she was committed to him but that she would not have to follow through because he would not be able to enter the country. However, to her dismay, O did find a way to enter Turkey in August 2014.
O then beat U3 until she acquiesced to go to Syria with him. She did this in fear of herself and her children and this was accepted by the SIAC. Once in Syria, her abuse continued and she was beaten with a metal rod and other objects, raped, locked up, subject to threats, degraded, shamed, isolated, falsely imprisoned, controlled and had her ankle broken, all by her husband. The SIAC even agreed that she had been micro-regulated by her husband and gaslighted by him.
The SIAC accepted that it was in her children’s best interests for her to be with them in the UK and they agreed that her abuse at the hands of her husband had been a major reason why she went to Syria, but they still found that she had the intention of going to IS occupied Syria to support her husband.
This seemingly shocking, given their acceptance of the abuse, decision is, unfortunately, a result of the SIAC’s hands being tied. The Supreme Court in the case regarding Shamina Begum established that the SIAC could only interfere in a decision of the Home Secretary if that decision did not meet the public law standard and the outcome, but for the suspected error, would have been different. They could not merely substitute the Home Secretary’s decision for their own because they disagreed with it.
This shows that, despite the overwhelming evidence in favour of U3, the SIAC is little more than useless in the face of cases like this. It is limited to solely checking the rationality of the Home Secretary’s original decision 5 years ago. It has no power to actually help U3 despite her tragic circumstances, even though the judges hinted in the judgment that they would if they could.
This once again exposes the fact that the SIAC is inherently unfair and raises questions for legal practitioners over whether it should even be engaged with if it cannot do anything to help those like U3 who are now effectively exiled from their home country and separated indefinitely from their children and family.