23 December 2025 – 6 January 2026
The continuing political and media feeding frenzy over the citizenship of Alaa Abd el-Fattah and Shamima Begum reveals the colonial roots and racist undertones of debates on Britishness and belonging, never far from the surface. The historic tweets of British-Egyptian rights campaigner el-Fattah calling for the killing of Zionists and police, posted 15 years ago in anger at the brutal treatment of the Palestinians, seized on by the Right, have rightly been rejected by the government as a basis for deprivation of his citizenship.
The government’s pledge to ‘robustly defend’ the revocation of Shamima Begum’s citizenship, in response to questions from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), tells a different story. As Begum’s lawyers repeatedly stressed in their unsuccessful journey through the UK’s courts, she was a victim of child trafficking, 15 when she left the UK to become a ‘jihadi bride’ – and the court wants to know how her treatment squares with the UK’s international obligations to trafficking victims. ‘National security’ , says the government, repeating the mantra of its predecessor. Since the previous government removed her citizenship, Begum, now 26, has spent nearly seven years in ‘inhuman’ conditions in a Syrian prison camp.
The ECtHR’s intervention set off another round of predictable apoplexy from the Right and its media, around the idea that human rights must be universal, applying to everyone. The Right has for years been trying to do away with the European Convention on Human Rights in favour of a ‘British Bill of Rights’ giving migrants lesser rights – and both Reform and the Conservatives are committed to leaving the ‘foreign court’. The government’s usual response is to concede ground to the Right – a dangerous and toxic strategy. Starmer’s recent lobbying of the ECtHR to ‘modernise’ its interpretation of key rights to allow easier deportation, contrary to its stated intention of defanging the hard Right, just emboldens it; every concession, every dilution of the rights of the most vulnerable has led to more extreme demands.
El-Fattah is British by descent, through his British-born mother. Without the grant of citizenship in 2021, he would still be in an Egyptian prison, where he spent over a decade as a human rights activist. The loss of it would send him back there. His situation, and Begum’s plight, with nowhere to go since Britain washed its hands of her – although British-born and bred, she is now stateless – reveal the truth of anti-Nazi and anti-Zionist philosopher Hannah Arendt’s words that citizenship is ‘the right to have rights’. Without a state to provide protection, paper rights are worth nothing.
The citizenship of dual nationals – mostly black and brown Britons – is already precarious, conditional on good behaviour. In today’s climate of vilification and intimidation of Muslims, migrants and asylum seekers by racist mobs, what we need is a robust defence, not of the exile of a reviled young British Muslim woman, but of universal human rights – and their protection through the rights of citizenship.