Jihadi bride Zehra Duman’s Australian citizenship is formally restored by High Court

Melbourne jihadi bride Zehra Duman’s citizenship is formally restored by the High Court, following the collapse of the Coalition-era citizenship cessation laws.

Zehra Duman at a family gathering at a Melbourne restaurant in 2012.

Australia’s first jihadi bride, Zehra Duman, has had her Australian citizenship formally restored by the High Court – and the taxpayer ordered to pay her legal fees.

The former Melbourne schoolgirl became a high-profile online cheerleader for ISIS after moving to Syria in 2014 to marry Melbourne jihadist Mahmoud Abdullatif.

One of only about two Australian women to lose her citizenship, she was notified in 2019 that her Australian statehood had been stripped as a result of her membership and support of ISIS.

She lodged an appeal in 2020, but the case was not formally resolved until last week, when the High Court signed off on a consent order which read: “The court declares that the first plaintiff is an Australian citizen.’’

The defendant – the Commonwealth of Australia – was ordered to pay her legal fees.

Duman had lodged the application for herself and her young son and daughter.

The family were last known to be living in Turkey, after Duman escaped the al-Hawl detention camp for ISIS families in 2021 and made it over the Turkey-Syria border.

She was taken into custody but released shortly afterwards into the community.

The formalisation of the restoration of her citizenship comes almost a year after the federal government advised her legal team it would not dispute her claim to have her citizenship restored.

The move followed the collapse of the Coalition government-era citizenship cessation laws in June last year, which were found by the High Court to be invalid because they relied on a ministerial decision instead of a judicial decision.

The collapse of the laws meant about a dozen ISIS fighters, members or supporters were immediately eligible to have their citizenship restored. All had lost their citizenship without being convicted in an Australian court.

During her time in Syria, Duman used social media to promote attacks on the West, calling for nonbelievers to be killed and attacks launched on Australia, the UK and the US.

She posted photos of women wearing conservative Islamic dress and brandishing rifles.

Duman was photographed and videoed talking to members of the Free Burma Rangers aid agency at the fall of ISIS’s last stronghold of Baghouz in March 2019, where she and all other ISIS family members were taken into custody by the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces.

Zehra Duman - holding her daughter - with aid workers from the Free Burma Rangers in Baghouz in Syria in March 2019.

Abdullatif was killed in 2015 and Duman is believed to have married twice more.

While Duman’s was the first such appeal lodged against the Coalition’s citizenship cessation laws, the precedent case which brought the legislation down involved a man named Delil Alexander, who is jailed in the Syrian capital of Damascus, and whose family launched the appeal on his behalf.

His case was upheld in June last year.

Both Alexander and Duman are dual Turkish-Australian nationals.

The government intends to plug the loophole left by the collapse of the laws, with legislation that would require a court order to strip citizenship from an Australian dual national.

It is believed the government plans to make the law retrospective, and would apply it to people who commit terrorism offences offshore as well as on Australian soil.

However, the legislation is on hold pending two further High Court challenges to citizenship cessation.

Melbourne jihadist Mahmoud Abdullatif.

One is by Australia’s most notorious convicted terrorist, Algerian-born Abdul Nacer Benbrika, who is due to be released from prison in Melbourne after almost two decades served for terrorism offences.

Unlike Duman, Benbrika lost his citizenship after being convicted in court in Australia, and his appeal relates to a different part of the citizenship cessation legislation.

A second appeal from a dual national man convicted of child sex offences is also being heard this year in the High Court.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil has previously attacked the Coalition’s failed laws and vowed that the new laws will be “tough and they will work.’’

“Laws that fail in the courts do not make the country safer,’’ she said.

Of the about 20 people who lost their citizenship since the laws were introduced in 2015, the majority are men, and a handful have since been killed, including notorious Sydney man Khaled Sharrouf, the first to lose citizenship when he was in Syria in 2017.