Shamima Begum should be brought back to the United Kingdom.
At first glance, revoking the citizenship of a terrorist sounds like a reasonable enough option.
ISIS' crimes are no longer front page news, but we should not forget the atrocities the group is responsible for.
The 2015 Bataclan massacre.
A truck ploughing into dozens of people in Nice.
The Manchester bombing. The utter decimation of cities across Iraq and Syria, where homosexuals and dissenters were burned alive and thrown from buildings in front of HD cameras that were used to broadcast the terror across the world.
Anyone who has facilitated the crimes of ISIS in any way deserves to be held accountable as an accessory to mass murder, at the very least. Conspiracy to commit hate crimes, war crimes, terrorist offences. Enough charges to put someone away for as long as even the most punitive public could hope for.
Prosecution for these crimes is what would have awaited Begum upon her return to her home country.
And make no mistake, prosecution is essential. Begum is barely repentant. Her husband, a Dutch ISIS fighter, was fighting with the organisation until just weeks ago, when he was forced to surrender to the Syrian army. She has said that she will wait for him if he is prosecuted in the Netherlands.
But revoking someone's citizenship doesn't hold them accountable in the same way due process can. It feels harsher. More venomous. To leave somebody stateless. Without any protection, without any home. That's why Home Secretary Sajid Javid is doing it. Because it makes him look uncompromising.
But really, it's just very poor decision-making.
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The part that Begum herself played in ISIS' reign of terror is unknown, and now, thanks to Javid's decision, it never will be.
How Javid has failed to see the benefit of questioning someone who spent years embedded with a terrorist network is almost beyond comprehension. Begum is a young girl prepared to turn herself over to authorities and submit herself to questioning.
Her insight into not only how ISIS operated but how they went about converting young girls in Europe through their computer screens would have been invaluable. With a stroke of a pen, that opportunity has been lost. All in the name of looking tough.
Begum has not helped herself. Indeed, the interviews she has given would be comical were they not so utterly grim.
Speaking to ITV News, Begum said: "I don't have any weapons, I don't want to hurt anyone even if I did have weapons. He [Javid] has no proof that I'm a threat... Other than that I was in ISIS." It's a mind-exploding lack of self-awareness and maybe the kind of naivety that would have a young person thinking that joining ISIS was a good idea in the first place.
Elsewhere, she has said that people should have sympathy for her as a girl who was groomed into ISIS at the age of 15.
Whether or not any individual feels sympathy comes down to personal instinct, but most 15-year-olds can identify for themselves that joining
actual ISIS is fundamentally wrong. She didn't drink a cheeky naggin or get into a regrettable fight or cheat on her boyfriend. She left her home to join a terrorist network notorious for its beheadings, burnings and leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.
There's always a case to be made for sympathy, humanity, compassion, whatever you want to call it. Danny Dyer articulated this well on Good Morning Britain, saying: "I feel she needs a chance, maybe to explain what was going on and maybe we can understand a little bit more about how they got to her and how she felt it was the right move to jump on a plane and leave this country at 15 years of age.
"She is still a young girl – who was looking after her? Maybe we can learn from it."
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Dyer, as he so often does these days, makes a good point. There are many questions to ask about how young people raised in Europe can be radicalised in such a way that they leave their friends, family and future behind in order to go aid a cause hellbent on little else besides carnage and catastrophe.
Only by understanding that process and all of its component parts will countries like the UK be able to stop it from happening again. Any society where such a thing can happen is not doing everything right.
Javid has decided against improving his country's safety and instead opted for the option that sounds cruellest. A symbolic option that serves no purpose besides chest beating and eventual self-defeat. Javid has missed an open goal and run off celebrating anyway.
And all this leaves to another side the human rights consideration of such a punishment — and the precedent it sets.
Revoking someone's citizenship is similar to the death penalty in that it abandons the idea that the justice system should be rehabilitative. Indeed, it steps outside of justice altogether, since it doesn't involve a judge or a jury.
Normalising the removal of someone's citizenship as punishment for crimes is a worrisome development. The state should not be allowed to absolve itself of the crimes of its citizens. Where would logic like that end? Once you commit X crime then you're no longer our problem?
Shamima Begum has not reckoned with what she has done. The UK government is happy enough to leave it at that.
