LONDON: An independent terrorism legislation reviewer has told the UK to repatriate more British nationals from Syria.
Jonathan Hall, who advises the government on counterterrorism laws, also said the threat posed by Shamima Begum, the young Londoner who fled the UK aged 15 to join Daesh in 2015, and who lost her citizenship in 2019, was small, because her relative fame would mean needing to apply for a lifelong anonymity order, and constant monitoring.
Hall told an all-party parliamentary group on trafficked British people in Syria: “I think it’s inevitable that many of these people will come back. And … if it’s going to happen, you must make it happen sooner or later.”
Around 900 people with links to the UK traveled to Syria and Iraq to join Daesh. Hall said more than 60 former British nationals, including children, remained in detention in the region.
He said: “The government did face the prospects of hundreds and hundreds of capable men coming back, and I have some sympathy with why the government took the decisions it did at that time, although I think the long-term implications are probably bad.
“But the position is now very different: A large number of people have been killed. Being able to show that there is a difference between the threat that existed from those people who traveled out in 2015-17 and now, may be an important factor when deciding whether or not the policy can be revisited.”
The UK is under pressure from allies including the US to repatriate more of its citizens from Syria.
Hall said the government needed to recognize “the factual position on the ground has changed” and that mechanisms needed to be created to return citizens and those deprived of citizenship back to the UK.
Temporary exclusion orders allowing the return of citizens suspected of terrorism abroad should be extended to these repatriated British residents, he added, saying that control orders could also be imposed on returning children.
However, he acknowledged that it would be difficult politically to facilitate the return of potentially dangerous people due to the adversarial nature of the UK’s court system and the inadmissibility of evidence gleaned by security services.
Elsewhere, in Geneva, Fionnuala Ni Aolain, the UN’s special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, reported on a six-day trip to Al-Hawl and Roj camps in northern Syria.
She said around 52,000 people remain in the camps, 80 percent of whom are children under the age of 12. She added that at the current rate the camps will take almost two decades to close unless repatriation of foreign nationals quickens.
Ni Aolain added that the conditions in the camps “constitute arbitrary and indefinite mass detention without legal or judicial process.”
