Three British-Bangladeshis, whose UK citizenship was revoked after they were said to have left the UK for Syria to join terrorist group the Islamic State (IS), have won an appeal against the verdict.
Of them, two women who were born in the UK - now identified as C3 and C4 - were stripped of their British citizenship in November 2019, on the grounds that they were a threat to national security, the Guardian reports.
The third person, C7, a man born in Bangladesh who is also a British citizen at birth, had his citizenship revoked in March 2020 allegedly because he had aligned with the IS and was a threat to UK national security, the report further adds.
All three appealed against the removal of their British citizenship at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) - a special tribunal that hears appeals against decisions to remove someone's British citizenship on national security grounds - in November.
Left stateless
The UK Home Office argued that all three were dual British-Bangladeshi nationals at the time their British citizenship was removed, and so the decision did not render them stateless.
However, their lawyers said all three lost their Bangladeshi citizenship when they turned 21, meaning the decision did leave them stateless and was therefore unlawful.
In a ruling at the tribunal on Thursday, Justice Martin Chamberlain said: “C3, C4 and C7 have persuaded us that, on the dates when the decisions and the orders in their cases were made, they were not nationals of Bangladesh or any other state apart from the UK. This means that orders depriving them of their British citizenship would make them stateless.
The judge further said the UK secretary of state had no power to make orders with that effect.
"For that reason – and that reason alone – the appeals against the decisions to make those orders succeed,” he added.
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Following the ruling, a spokesperson from the the UK Home Office said: "We are extremely disappointed with this judgment and the court's decision that deprivation cannot stand in these cases. The government's priority remains maintaining the safety and security of the UK."
"This ruling confirms that in the home secretary's rush to abdicate responsibility for these women, she broke domestic and international law by rendering them stateless," said Maya Foa, director of human rights group Reprieve, reports Express.co.uk.
"Reprieve has established that many people from Britain currently detained in north-east Syria fit the definition of trafficked persons," she added.
"The government was wrong to remove citizenship from these women. Now that it has been restored, the government should repatriate them so that the British justice system can address the full complexity of their cases, including the real possibility they are victims of trafficking," Foa further added.
This ruling comes three weeks after the UK Supreme Court rejected the bid by another British-Bangladeshi citizen, IS Bride Shamima Begum, to return to the country to challenge the decision revoking her UK citizenship, on the grounds of national security.
Begum, who fled Britain as a 15-year-old schoolgirl with two others to join IS in Syria in 2015, failed in her legal bid to restore her citizenship.
The UK government, in stripping her citizenship, said she was eligible for Bangladeshi citizenship, the birth country of her parents.
However, Bangladesh has said she was never a citizen and will not be allowed into the country.