Anna Soubry
Main Page: Anna Soubry (The Independent Group for Change - Broxtowe)Department Debates - View all Anna Soubry's debates with the Home Office
(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Sajid Javid
I absolutely understand my hon. Friend’s point. He has pointed out, quite correctly, the challenges of prosecution of foreign terrorist fighters who return to the UK. As we have heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), one challenge is having the right laws in place—we are making some changes to that—and another is collecting battlefield evidence. These individuals are returning from a war zone. Collecting evidence in the battlefield is incredibly difficult, but we have done, and continue to do, a lot of work through the MOD and with our defence allies and Five Eyes partners to try collect more such evidence, so that we can use it in the courts for more successful prosecutions.
Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Ind)
We now know that some 100 Daesh terrorist fighters have returned to the United Kingdom, and it seems that only 40 of them have been prosecuted. Meanwhile, a number of women who have given succour and support to Daesh—ISIS—have been stripped of their British citizenship. Several of them are mothers and their children are British citizens, to whom the Government, like it or not, have a duty because they are under the age of 16. The Home Secretary tells us that those young women are such a threat to our country’s security that they have had to have their British citizenship taken away from them. On what possible basis does the Home Secretary take the view that they are fit and proper people to care for children who are British citizens in refugee camps?
Sajid Javid
My right hon. Friend raises a number of points. First, there is no British consular presence in Syria, so it is incredibly difficult for the British Government to intervene directly or to provide help for any British citizen there, whether a child or an adult. That is why the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has been making it very clear since 2011 that no British citizen should enter that war zone. She also seems to question the dangers that might be posed by female terrorists. One public case that I can refer to went through our courts in June 2018. Safaa Boular, aged 18, was convicted of planning to travel to Syria and to engage in terrorist acts. Soon after, her mother, her sister and her female friend also pleaded guilty to terrorism charges. They were going to set up a female terror cell, and had they succeeded, there would have been deaths in this country. No one should make a judgment on the threat of a terrorist based on their gender.