400 Returning Islamic State Fighters Face Justice
Breaking News: Over 400 Returning Islamic State Fighters Face Justice in the UK after serving ISIS in Syria and Iraq. A new report urges legal reforms to ensure justice, strengthening authorities’ ability to prosecute. Stay informed on the fight against terrorism.
Almost 400 people who fought for the group (also known as ISIS and Daesh) are believed to have then returned to the UK, after going to the Middle East.
ISIS previously occupied sprawls of land in Syria and Iraq, and engaged in large-scale terror, murder, and rape.
- This usually focused on the minority religious communities, such as Yazidis.
- Sky News has just aired a documentary about ISIS and the Yazidis, produced by special correspondent Alex Crawford.
Crawford appeared before parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR), which in a new report has warned that none of the ISIS supporters who had returned to the UK had been successfully prosecuted.
It urged the government to do more to ensure they are brought to British courts, after ministers previously said such crimes were “best investigated and prosecuted under local laws,” which is overseas.
‘The UK can not wash its hands of this.’
“Where the UK has jurisdiction over international crimes, the UK should seek to investigate and prosecute such crimes, ” the committee’s latest report said.
However, a report said UK courts had a “key barrier” in meting out justice on war crimes and genocide.
This was done because no suspects can be prosecuted for these crimes if they are not UK nationals, residents, or “subject to service personnel laws”.
The committee said ministers should use the Crime and Policing Bill (still passing through parliament) to change the law.
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“In recent months, we have ascertained that this is a serious issue which is blighting the lives of women and girls across the country, sometimes with devastating consequences,” Lord Alton, the JCHR chairman, said. This is not something that can be washed away on the basis that this happened elsewhere by the UK.
“We know that British nationals carried out the most horrendous crimes in Iraq and Syria under the Daesh [ISIS] regime, and it is our responsibility to see them brought to justice”.
To date, no Daesh fighters have effectively been prosecuted for international crimes in the UK, and we find this unacceptable.
The committee added that more needs to be done to bring children out of camps in northeast Syria that host former ISIS fighters and their families.
There Are No Rights To Anything
It was one of the people who gave evidence to the committee – Crawford.
She encountered the first Yazidi woman captured by ISIS in 2014, and has reported on the subject a few times since, among them the 10 Years Of Darkness: ISIS & The Yazidis documentary.
She told the committee the camps in northeast Syria were “filled with hopelessness and helplessness, and a really strong anger and frustration”.
She said there were several concerns about human rights, and those who lived there essentially had no rights.
She went on: There is no freedom right. There is no right to legal representation. Rights do not exist for anything.
I don’t know how many of the children have been born there.
“They are very young–younger than six–so many of them have been born there in, let’s be honest, in very dirty, disgusting conditions”.
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