Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Marina Wheeler Chaired by Stephen Law

Writer and commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and lawyer and columnist Marina Wheeler debate our responsibilities to the so-called Isis Brides who travelled to Syria and ask whether they should be allowed to return to the UK.

Shamima Begum was one of three East London girls who left the UK for Syria in 2015. She is now held in a refugee camp in Syria. Her case drew public attention to the many Muslim women and teenage girls who had voluntarily left their home countries to join the Islamic State and now wanted to return. Begum was stripped of her UK nationality. The UN estimates around 8,000 children of foreign terrorist fighters also languish in such squalid camps. Some women remain devoted to ISIS and work as violent enforcers within the camps. Others have turned their back on the ideology but are terrified of admitting it. What are our responsibilities to Begum, and other British ‘Isis Brides’ and their children now languishing behind barbed wire? Should they be allowed to return to the UK?

Alibhai-Brown is a British journalist and author who has written extensively on issues of diversity and social justice. Her books include In Defence of Political Correctness, Refusing The Veil, and Exotic England: The Making of A Curious Nation. Wheeler is a lawyer, author, and columnist. She has a particular interest in human rights law, including cases involving suspected radicalisation. She is author of a memoir, The Lost Homestead: My Family, Partition and the Punjab, detailing her family’s history in India.

Discussions are chaired by Dr Stephen Law, a philosopher and academic, author of bestselling introductions to philosophy for adults and children, and editor of the Royal Institute of Philosophy Journal Think.