When Frontline member Anthony Loyd found Shamima Begum in al-Hawl refugee camp, northern Syria, he helped unearth a series of unanswered questions for Western societies – and kickstarted a national debate in the United Kingdom. When it comes to citizens returning from IS territory, what are our legal and moral responsibilities? Is there a two-tier system developing, with citizenship as privilege for the children of Muslim immigrants, and nationality as right for European ‘natives’? With first-hand reporting from Anthony Loyd, and comment from columnist Nesrine Malik and expert on jihadist movements Shiraz Maher, we’ll be discussing the fallout of British Home Secretary Sajid Javid’s decision to revoke Shamima Begum’s citizenship. This discussion will be chaired by presenter of BBC HardTalk Stephen Sackur.

Chair

Stephen Sackur is the presenter of HARDtalk, the BBC World News flagship current affairs interview programme. He has been a journalist with BBC News since 1986 and has interviewed many high-profile guests for BBC World News, BBC News Channel and BBC World Service. Before taking over HARDtalk, he was based in Brussels for three years as the BBC’s Europe Correspondent. Prior to this, he was the BBC’s Washington Correspondent from July 1997. He served as the BBC Middle East Correspondent in both Cairo (from 1992 to 1995) and Jerusalem (from 1995 to 1997). He has contributed countless articles to The Observer, London Review of Books, New Statesman, The Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. In November 2010, he received the International TV Personality of the Year Award from the Association of International Broadcasters.

Speakers

Anthony Loyd is senior foreign correspondent for The Times. His career began in 1993 when he started reporting from the war in Bosnia. Since then he has written from innumerable conflict zones, including Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Chechnya and Kosovo. He is author of My War Gone By I Miss It So and Another Bloody Love Letter. He has witnessed the atrocities committed by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the brutal rise of the self-styled Islamic State and the desperate struggle of the Syrian people caught between the two. You can read about his experiences following the case of Shamima Begum here.

Nesrine Malik is a British Sudanese columnist and features writer for The Guardian. She was born in Sudan and grew up in Kenya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. She received her undergraduate education at the American University in Cairo and University of Khartoum, and her post graduate education at the University of London. Alongside her journalism career she previously spent ten years in emerging markets private equity. She was named Society and Diversity Commentator of the Year at the 2017 Comment Awards. You can read her writings about Islamophobia in the UK here.

Shiraz Maher is Director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) and a lecturer in non-state actors for the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He currently leads the Centre’s research on the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts and also researches Salafi-Jihadism. Maher is a recognised expert on the current Middle East crisis and jihadist movements. His book, Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea has been widely acknowledged as a ground-breaking exploration of the political philosophy behind contemporary jihadist movements. His writings on the Syrian conflict were shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2016. You can view his comments on the case of Shamima Begum on Newsnight here.

  Watch the video stream of Shamima Begum: A Crisis Of Citizenship

On 3 November at the Frontline Club, photojournalist Greg Constantine spoke to UNHCR’s UK representative Gonzalo Vargas Llosa about Nowhere People, Constantine’s body of ten years of photographic work on the world’s estimated 10m stateless people.

A stateless person “under law is considered no citizen of any country,” said Constantine. “Once citizenship is severed, it opens people up to an array of deprivation of rights.”

The number of global stateless may exceed 10m, according to Vargas Llosa, as “very few governments want to give exact statistics on stateless people inside their borders.”

Constantine’s talk at the Frontline Club comes on the first anniversary of the launch of I Belong, a UN campaign to “end the scourge of statelessness by 2024,” said Vargas Llosa.

Constantine showed images from his meetings with stateless peoples, including the Rohingya in Bangladesh and Malaysia; Nubians in Kenya; Filipinos in Saba, Malaysia; the Dali in Nepal; the Dom in Iraq; ethnic Haitians in the Dominican Republic; and Roma in Italy.

“Roma fell through huge legal gaps where citizenship was not extended to them” after end of Yugoslavia says @grconstantine @frontlineclub

— Charlotte Beale (@CharlotteAGB) November 3, 2015

Constantine also shared quotes from stateless men and women he had met, including from Jafar, a stateless Rohingya in Bangladesh: “Because we don’t have citizenship, we are like a fish out of water, flapping and unable to breathe. When a fish is out of water, he suffocates.”

“The legacy of colonialism is very much a part of people becoming stateless in Asia and Africa,” said Constantine. “The creation of the idea of ‘others’ that came from French colonialism is responsible for the Ivory Coast’s stateless people… Denial of citizenship is directly attached to Ivorian conflict and the 2002 civil war was borne from a clash of identity – us and them.”

He added: “Most times, you find stateless people are not refugees. Most have never left the country in which they were born.”

“The Rohingya is by far the most extreme example of statelessness in the world today,” Constantine continued, despite them playing a huge role in the economy of southern Bangladesh.

“40,000 Rohingya are living segregated lives in Internationally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps [in Burma],” said Constantine. They are put up in “tents… that psychologically make them think their situation as IDPs is temporary… The conflict has been manufactured by Burmese central government, by 40 years of oppressive policies that pitted communities against each other.”

“The administrative tactics states use to humiliate their stateless fly under the radar of the world’s media,” said Constantine. Discrimination against ethnic Haitians in the Dominican Republic has been “manifested into policy.”

Vargas Llosa added that in the Dominican Republic, “statelessness is the result of deliberate, well-planned, well-executed policies” by the government.

While “huge strides” have been made in Iraq, which has “some of the most progressive laws in the Middle East,” Domari gypsies still suffer. Similarly, after the break-up of Yugoslavia, “Roma fell through huge legal gaps where citizenship was not extended to them.” Because of certain laws, generations of Roma in Italy “are not afforded opportunities to become citizens,” Constantine said.

“Gender discriminating nationality laws are all over the Middle East and Africa,” added Constantine. He highlighted this with a comment on the situation in Lebanon – a young subject born to a Lebanese mother and a stateless father must inherit her father’s stateless condition. 27 countries globally limit a mother’s ability to pass her nationality onto her family.

A member of the audience pointed out that “the state is often an enemy of the people it is supposed to be administering,” and asked Constantine and Vargas Llosa their opinion of the role of the state in creating statelessness crises.

“What strikes one from Greg’s images is the evil a state can do,” Vargas Llosa agreed. “What happens when the caregiver of human rights ends up being the vehicle which perpetrates the denial of those rights?”

Constantine deplored the “sovereign right of a state to determine who its citizens are and who they aren’t.”

Visit the Nowhere People website to find out more.