more heat than light wrote:Parksey wrote:If I committed a crime here in Japan, I'm sure no-one would object to me being deported and sent back to the UK to face the consequences. Of course, I'm sure that fact that I'm a (damn attractive) young Caucasian male definitely wouldn't alter how people say others as "ours" and "not ours", but that's by the by.
You're right, but if your crime was the same (ie, leaving to join a terrorist organisation) I don't think you'd have as much sympathy as you think.
I would expect sympathy, nor am I massively sympathetic towards Begum herself. She hasn't shown herself to be particularly repentant, and only seems to want to come back because the squalid conditions over there have cost the lives of two other children. It definitely strikes me as opportunistic rather than a reformed character seeing the light. She still strikes me as quite an arrogant and naive teenager. As a completely aside, we do need to remember though, that her radicalisation wont have been entirely her own doing and she was radicalised as a minor, though I'm not sure how these impact on things legally.
But in a legal sense, how sympathetic a case is has no bearing on matters. As far as I am aware, legally the crime committed has no bearing on what the Government are trying to do - which is effectively leave her stateless and hoping someone else picks her up (why would they, as I previously said).
How sympathetic we are towards her, how much we like her or how much we want her back, having no bearing. Begum might have idealogically forsaken British values and laws when she left for Syria, but legally and morally, she has to be treated as a British citizen as things currently stand.
That sort of distance between what we feel and think and how our laws try and deal with people, is arguably one of the foundations of what we call "British values", so it's odd that some want them to not apply to a British citizen because it suits their personal emotions.
As for the comparison with me, I wouldn't expect sympathy either had I done something similar in Japan.
But I just wonder, if it was my (sexy) white face plastered all over the news, whether there would be the same clamour to strip me off my citizenship. I'd probably make the news, but the media circus would probably be about me being deported back here and any subsequent crime, rather than trying to weasel a way out of it and make me not a British citizen. I doubt they'd be looking at my immediate family and trying to see if they could give me to another country.
If I had commited a crime immediately before getting on a plane to Japan, would people back in the UK be saying I should never be allowed to set foot back in the country again? Would there be a massive backlash if it was revealed I was coming back to face any consequences of actions or any relevant criminal proceedings against me? Would anyone object to British justice for a British citizen in that sense? Maybe not for everyone voicing opinions on that story, but I don't think people's reactions would be quite the same if it was a young Caucasian face staring back at them on the front page of their newspaper.
To be honest, I wonder if they'd have done the same too, had the other country been someone like France or America, rather than little old Bangladesh. It's pretty insulting to try and coerce another country in to dealing with something which is, in every sense, your problem.
Like I said, her mum might have been Bangladeshi but Begum was born in the UK, lived here her whole life, was educated her and radicalised here. Her crime of leaving with the intent of joining a terrorist organisation was commited here, given that she lied to her family about where she was going (she wasn't just wandering g through the Syrian desert trying to take some awesome Instagram photos and got turned).
Again, putting all feelings aside, in what sense should she be stripped of her citizenship? The only reason the government have of doing so is that her mother was born in another country. Isn't that white a frighteningly tenuous thing to be used in order to remove your nationality? It flies in the face of what we all believe to constitute a citizen - and what makes us a citizen - as well as being on very, very shaky legal ground.
