Lawyers tell hearing that British woman held in Syria will not be able to fight case against her

Shamima Begum, the former east London schoolgirl who fled to Syria and joined Islamic State, is facing an “extreme scenario” in which she will be unable to fight the case against her, a hearing has been told.

Begum has been able to pass instructions to her lawyers from the prison camp in Syria where she has been held since being stripped of her British citizenship. However, lawyers who are appealing against that action at the Special Immigration and Appeals Commission (Siac) in London say they have not been able to discuss the case against her in any detail.

Begum’s lawyer said that when the woman was deprived of her citizenship, Sajid Javid, the then home secretary, knew she had just given birth, was caring for the infant, and it was “very clear that there was a serious problem in relation to the health and wellbeing of children in the camp at that time”.

Conditions in the al-Hawl camp were so bad that over the course of a few nights 35 children died, earning it the nickname the “camp of death”. Begum’s baby died of pneumonia 10 days after he was born.

Tom Hickman QC, representing Begum, said deprivation of citizenship had been around since 1948, but “this is an extreme scenario”.

“If someone is unable to appeal in any meaningful way, it must be unlawful,” he added.

Begum had been able to indicate that she wanted to appeal against the decisions, and to instruct solicitors from the firm Birnberg Peirce. But there had been “very limited contact” since then and there was a “prohibition imposed by camp authorities on certain access to people detained in the [Roj] camp” in northern Syria to which Begum had been moved.

He said there were “treacherous difficulties” presented by the case and added: “It is simply not possible, practically, to take instructions on the national security aspect of the case.

“It is not possible to take instructions on her intentions, the circumstances in which she left, what she has been doing, family relations and so forth.

“It is fairly obvious there are exceptionally severe restrictions on her ability to give instructions and it is frankly remarkable that she has been able to get this case into this court at all.”

He said the national security case against Begum was “very general”, arguing only that she “travelled to Syria” and was “aligned” with Islamic State.

“If that is the case, we could potentially meet the arguments if we could liaise with our client,” Hickman said. “There is very conscious obscurity about what ‘aligned with Isis’ means.”

Priti Patel, the home secretary, said in her case put to the tribunal that 40% of those who had returned to Britain from Syria had been assessed as posing a “low security risk”. But she also said that anybody who stayed fell into a different bracket.

The case against Begum emphasised the circumstances in which she left and relied on the fact that she made a conscious effort to hide her travel plans from the authorities by using her sister’s passport.

Begum left Britain in February 2015 when she was 15, with two friends from the Bethnal Green academy in east London. The other girls are thought to have been killed in the conflict.

In Syria, Begum married an Isis fighter called Yago Riedijk, from Arnhem, Netherlands, when she was still 15 and he was 23.

The couple had three children, two of whom died of disease or malnutrition during the terrorist group’s last stand at Baghuz. The third died in al-Hawl camp.

Now in the Roj camp, Begum has stopped wearing the black face veil mandated by Isis and appealed to come home, saying: “I hate the Dawla [Isis] so much.”

The camps were said to be “at breaking point”, with inadequate water and food provision and ongoing cases of malnutrition.

The case continues.

• This article was amended on 25 October 2019 to clarify the detail about the veil previously worn by Begum.