This article is more than 10 months old

This article is more than 10 months old

The UK government has considered options for repatriating British members of Islamic State being held in prison camps in northern Syria, it has emerged.

The information was disclosed during the hearing into the home secretary’s decision to remove the citizenship of Shamima Begum, the former Bethnal Green schoolgirl who travelled to Syria at the age of 15.

It contradicts a previous assertion by the government that it has no way of getting British Isis fighters, their wives and children out of Syria.

The government document, referred to at the tribunal, was dated 4 April 2019 and headed “options for extracting British nationals from Syrian IDP camps” – a reference to internally displaced people.

Tom Hickman QC, for Begum, said the document stated: “While difficult, the practical challenges in arranging and implementing an extraction are likely to have solutions.”

Begum was already in the camp when she was deprived of her British citizenship, but her lawyer said there had been a “foreseeable chance of her being repatriated”.

“If they hadn’t taken her citizenship away, as time went on, pressure would build and build to repatriate, particularly where women and children are involved, to the UK,” he told the Special Immigration and Appeals Commission (Siac).

“There was a foreseeable chance of her being repatriated to the UK because that’s stated in terms. We don’t accept it was merely speculation.”

The Foreign Office minister Andrew Murrison repeated this week that “the UK has no consular presence in Syria from which to provide assistance”.

He has promised to “do all we can for unaccompanied minors and orphans”, but that leaves children with parents in the camps in a legal limbo.

This week a Human Rights Watch report said 30 British women and 60 British children were being detained by Kurdish authorities in north-east Syria.

According to the report the children are all below the age of 12 and a significant majority are younger than five, with the vast majority detained with their mothers.

Shamima Begum faces 'extreme scenario' in citizenship appeal Read more

Human Rights Watch said the Roj camp, where Begum is held, and the al-Hawl camp, where she was previously held, remained under the control of Kurdish authorities and outside the proposed Turkish buffer zone.

The campaign group said there were no active hostilities between the Kurds and Turkey near these camps and the route out of north-east Syria to Iraq was still held by the Kurdish authority.

Jonathan Glasson QC, for the home secretary, told the hearing of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) that even if Begum succeeded in having her citizenship reinstated, her “detention will be unaffected”.

Profile Shamima Begum's journey into Isis Show Hide February 2015 At the age of 15, Shamima Begum flees her home in Bethnal Green, east London. She travels with schoolfriends Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana. The three intend to meet another friend, Sharmeena Begum – no relation of Shamima – who had travelled to Syria in late 2014. CCTV footage shows the girls walking through Gatwick airport, where they boarded a flight to Turkey. There they are picked up by smugglers and taken across the border to an Isis base in northern Syria. Once there they move into a women’s house in Raqqa and apply to marry. July 2015 The families of the girls say that two of them have married Isis fighters, without disclosing which. They say they are distraught at the news. It later emerges that Begum had married 27-year-old Yago Riedijk, an Isis fighter from the Netherlands, 10 days after arriving in Raqqa. Soon afterwards she became pregnant with her first child, a daughter named Sarayah. July 2016 Abase marries an 18-year-old Australian jihadist, Abdullah Elmir. He was later reported by intelligence agencies to have been killed by a coalition airstrike. August 2016 Sultana’s family say that they believe she had been killed in an airstrike in Raqqa in May 2016. January 2017 Begum and her family flee Raqqa as Isis retreats and head south-east to the town of Mayadin. She has another child, a son called Jerah. Later, the family moves again as Isis is pushed back. June 2018 Begum sees her two surviving classmates, Sharmeena Begum and Abase, for the last time. Late 2018 Jerah dies, aged eight months, of malnutrition and an unknown illness. Her daughter dies soon after, aged one year and nine months. February 2019 Begum, who is heavily pregnant, gives an interview to the Times, in which she says that she should be allowed to return to the UK to raise her unborn third child. She gives birth a few days later. The Home Office tells her family that her citizenship will be revoked. March 2019 Jarrah, Begum's new born son, dies in a Syrian refugee camp. The child was three weeks old.

Photograph: POOL New/X80003

“Even if her appeal succeeds it could not result in her return,” he said. “Her treatment is the same as British citizens who have not been deprived.”

Glasson said the government accepted that the situation in Syria was “fluid and volatile” and Begum could not give live evidence or make a witness statement.

But he said that should not prevent the home secretary from removing her citizenship, adding: “The more committed and extreme an individual is, the more likely they would find themselves in a situation where they were less able to participate in proceedings and so less likely to be the subject of deprivation and that cannot possibly be right.”

Begum left Britain in February 2015 when she was 15, with two friends from the Bethnal Green academy in east London, using her older sister’s passport.

In Syria, Begum married an Isis fighter and the couple had three children, all of whom died of disease or malnutrition, the last in a prison camp in northern Syria.

She was stripped of her British citizenship on the grounds of national security in February, amid a political row over whether she was a dual British and Bangladeshi citizen.

But under UN conventions signed after the second world war, making a person stateless is unlawful.

Now in the Roj camp, Begum has appealed to come home, saying: “I hate the Dawla [Isis] so much.”

Hickman said the situation in the camp meant Begum had not been able to speak privately to her lawyers about what happened to her.

“We do not know if she is one of the people who tried to run away from Isis or whether she would have done so if she could have done. We simply don’t know any of these things,” he added.

The Siac hearing went into closed session before adjourning for judgment at a later date.

• This article was amended on 26 October 2019. The original version incorrectly stated that Save the Children was looking after the children taken from the Ain Issa camp.