Rest in peace Motty 
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As far as Singapore goes , I’d be looking at Malaysia very closely. The govt there is increasingly becoming more and more right wing which does lead to more fundamentalists.
I’d say Singapore is doing the right step here but with the geographical and cultural proximities between Singapore and Malaysia , it becomes more incumbent on Malaysia and probably even Indonesia to do more.
As far as shamima begum goes , I do believe that UK ought to take her back. That doesn’t mean she gets to be a media celebrity staying at home and earning money by media appearances etc / book writing etc.
She needs to get back to UK and serve a proper sentence for her crimes. If she were a victim of traffiking , the govt won’t have these many objections to rehabilitate her. And there are serious allegations about her being a recruiter for ISIS. That’s when she starts loosing quite a bit of sympathy.
Get her back to UK , make her stand a swift trial and then incarcerate her for a pretty long time. She’s a UK citizen end of and from what it’s been said , the UK and their allies had prior information that she was planning to leave and failed to warn her family.
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And governments need to have a handle on what is being propagated in places of worship or in online media.
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That is the (potentially) problematic aspect of this case. Intelligence agencies don’t really have much in the way of a duty of care toward their citizens, police forces absolutely do. I just don’t know the details of what the Met’s prior knowledge was, and seeing her lawyers’ clear effort to muddy the waters on the matter of what ‘Canadian intelligence’ knew and when makes me suspect the entire argument is thin soup indeed. Knowing that efforts were ongoing to radicalize youth at a school which is apparently 75% Muslim is not the same as knowing that a particular individual was days away from making a run to Raqqa.
Did they have information she was planning to leave? Or were the police simply aware that she was one of the youth who were coming under the sway of radical elements? If the first, there is a real question as to why they did not detain her, to which the possible and legitimate answer is that it might have endangered the life of their information source. If the second, well, there are thousands of British citizen who did not end up leaving and retain civil rights that would preclude detention and indeed most means of intervention, precisely because they did not end up leaving.
The ‘allies had prior information’ part is simply nonsense cooked by by her representatives.
Either way , considering she was a minor when she left.
I’d think it would be a better thing to do to get her back and prosecute her for her crimes.
For me, the only question is whether she was mature enough to make the decision - if she was old enough to be held responsible for her crimes, she was old enough to take steps that result in her citizenship being stripped. I am untroubled by the fact that it is a form of legal jeopardy that only those with dual citizenship claims can face. I simply don’t know enough about her circumstances prior to departure to make that judgement, but I am quite willing to accept the idea that she simply wasn’t.
Point #1 - whether she was mature enough to make the decision is secondary. She for all intents served as a recruiter for ISIS after moving 5o Syria. You can make a case of being ignorant on the first… Not on the second part.
Point #2 - I don’t believe she’s got bangladeshi citizenship because her mother was a Bangladeshi. She isn’t eligible for dual citizenship because I believe in order to get a Bangladeshi passport , she needed to apply for one and that wasn’t done.
On the first point, I think she would have had little choice about her conduct when she arrived in Syria, and expecting a minor one might deem not capable of being held legally responsible to take a principled stand most adults would be terrified to attempt is not reasonable. For me, the critical nexus is the decision to leave, virtually everything flows from there.
On the second, the crux here is that by treaty she cannot be stripped of British citizenship if she has no other possible citizenship. Whether or not she has a passport is not relevant. However, it does become quite a mess if she is refused Bangladeshi citizenship under the law of Bangladesh.
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And there are provisions in law to be tried as an adult even in case of minors. I believe that provision is there in the UK law as well …
Well she isn’t a citizen of Bangladesh because she hasn’t applied for that citizenship.
One thing where I would appreciate the Indian policy of having to surrender the citizenship when a person gets eligible and opts to become a citizen of another nation.
Yes - but that is not automatic. The Crown actually faces a burden of proof as to the ability of the defendant to understand the decisions they took. But that is in some way a red herring as well, because if she is not a citizen, she has no right to trial. The UK’s position is that she is not responsible under UK law for entirely different reasons, and they have no responsibility for or to her.
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I think they’ve shot themselves in the foot here.
Right, but that is not the nature of the UK’s obligation under the treaty. A person cannot be rendered stateless by the act of a signatory nation, but anyone with a claim to citizenship is not stateless. The oddity is that by moving first, the UK puts Bangladesh in an awkward position.
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For me, the only interesting question is who is responsible for her, and that is Britain. The Islamic State does not exist and it is unreasonable to let her be the responsibility of the SDF. They have no such capacity and they don’t want her. She fought for their enemy, was defeated and Britain must of course take her back. What she “deserves” is a red herring, what the SDF deserves and what they can deal with is the only thing that matters.
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The SDF really has nothing to do with it, except custody at present. In particular, the SDF is not a recognized state and has no power to issue her a passport. She is either British or Bangladeshi, with the oddity that the British discussion as to whether she is British or not need not be informed in the least whether or not it makes any sense whatsoever that she is considered Bangladeshi.
To me, the idea that Bangladesh is somehow responsible for a kid who grew up in Birmingham seems perverse.
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They have everything to do with it in my view, Britain cynically dumped her on them and they have no capacity to hold her nor do they want her. Britain need to take her back. Al Hol is overcrowded. She is not their responsibility, or at least she shouldn’t be. This is some real Pontius Pilatus stuff, except Pontius was not half as guilty in comparison in my view. It would be better if they at least had shot her dead instead of this hand washing (not that they could but at least it would have been taking responsibility instead of just forcing the Kurds to feed and imprison her).
So I don’t agree really. I think this is cruel on the Kurds.
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Wait, is she a Bangladeishi citizen ? I was pretty sure she was not. If she is, then matters change of course.