Hayat Tar al-Sham or HTS went from a
jihadist movement once aligned to
al-Qaeda
>> to forming the official government of
Syria. a monumental transformation for
them, their country, and the wider
Middle East, but potentially too for
British people who went to Syria and who
were stripped of their citizenship as a
result on the grounds of national
security.
>> I am in Damascus. Allah Akbar, the
Bashar regime has fallen.
>> Toki Sharif, better known as Tox, went
to Syria in 2012 as an aid worker. As
you can see, there's uh even still lots
of artillery um that has been captured.
>> He was accused of being part of a group
affiliated with al-Qaeda, which he
denies, and the then home secretary
deprived him of his British citizenship
in 2017.
>> As of now, I am
deprived of my UK citizenship, but I'm
not a convicted terrorist. Uh and the
reason for that is because we refused,
we boycotted the SIAK secret courts, um
which don't allow you to see any of the
evidence presented against you. Um and
one of the things that I always called
for was look, put me in front of a jury.
Let's have an open hearing.
>> It's very humbling to be here. HDS is
still a prescribed terrorist
organization, but the British government
has established relations with it. The
foreign secretary traveled to Damascus
to meet the jihadist turned president,
the man who swapped his nom dear of Al
Jalani for Ahmed al-Shar. If the British
government takes HTS off the terrorist,
what does that mean for those who lost
their citizenship after being accused of
being part of it? We're talking about a
significant number of people. According
to the joint committee on human rights,
the UK uses deprivation of citizenship
orders more than almost any country in
the world. The peak was in 2017 at the
height of Islamic State in Syria when
scores of people left the UK for that
country. And because people cannot be
made entirely stateless and need a
second nationality, there are worries of
racism. Countries like Pakistan and
Bangladesh offer dual nationality where
other nations don't. We made a freedom
of information request to the home
office to ask for a breakdown of figures
by nationality, but were twice refused
on national security grounds. That makes
the whole thing a bit opaque. The Home
Secretary has tremendous power to remove
people's citizenship, and it's hard for
people to appeal that. The independent
reviewer of terrorism legislation thinks
things should be clearer. I do think
there is a a problem when you have
people whose relationship with the
country that they're left with is really
technical and they may never have
realized that they had a relation, you
know, had that citizenship before and
may never have gone to that country. Me
and my predecessors have all said owing
to how frequently this power was used.
It should be something that the
independent reviewer should have the
power to to review. Even if the
government does remove HTS from the
terror list, it wouldn't automatically
invalidate decisions to deprive people
of their citizenship.
>> Decisions that have been made years ago
um in the interest of the British public
have to remain. We can't sort of go
through previous cases, nitpicking
through it, wasting time and money. for
those that have a secondary citizenship
um and those who do fall under uh the
category of being able to have their
British citizenship removed, then I
think that is an entirely appropriate
thing to do um when when we consider the
the dreadful risk that they pose to the
public.
But those born and raised in Britain who
joined the same cause and lost their
citizenship as a result might reasonably
ask why that should remain the case. Tom
Chesher, Sky News.