Two mi­nor chil­dren who were pre­vi­ous­ly held in an or­phan­age in north­east Syr­ia have law­ful­ly ar­rived in Trinidad and To­ba­go, ac­cord­ing to a state­ment is­sued by at­tor­ney Criston J. Williams of Quan­tum Le­gal. Their ar­rival was fa­cil­i­tat­ed un­der a guardian­ship or­der is­sued by the High Court of Eng­land and Wales, with the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go (GoRTT) for­mal­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing in the pro­ceed­ings and ac­cept­ing ju­ris­dic­tion for their cit­i­zen­ship ap­pli­ca­tions.

The chil­dren’s repa­tri­a­tion fol­lows years of ap­peals by their rel­a­tives and com­plex le­gal process­es ini­ti­at­ed af­ter UK au­thor­i­ties in­ter­vened in April 2022. De­spite re­quests for as­sis­tance dat­ing back to 2019, the fam­i­ly re­ceived no sup­port from Trinida­di­an of­fi­cials un­til the UK gov­ern­ment stepped in, the state­ment not­ed.

Quan­tum Le­gal em­pha­sized that the High Court in Eng­land im­posed re­port­ing re­stric­tions to pro­tect the chil­dren’s pri­va­cy, pro­hibit­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of any in­for­ma­tion that could di­rect­ly or in­di­rect­ly re­veal their iden­ti­ties. The fam­i­ly is ap­peal­ing to the me­dia and the pub­lic to ob­serve these re­stric­tions to safe­guard the emo­tion­al well­be­ing and safe­ty of the mi­nors.

The press re­lease al­so al­leged that GoRTT had pro­vid­ed false state­ments dur­ing the le­gal pro­ceed­ings in the UK, and ac­cused the gov­ern­ment of cre­at­ing un­nec­es­sary de­lays that con­tributed to the chil­dren’s pro­longed hard­ship. Quan­tum Le­gal claimed that re­peat­ed re­quests to cor­rect mis­in­for­ma­tion were ig­nored.

Rep­re­sen­ta­tives from fam­i­ly ad­vo­ca­cy groups, in­clud­ing Ra­heema Khan of the Time is Right Now Fam­i­ly Group, are ex­pect­ed to is­sue ad­di­tion­al state­ments high­light­ing what they de­scribe as a six-year pat­tern of gov­ern­men­tal in­ac­tion and mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion.

The state­ment crit­i­cized gov­ern­ment agen­cies, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Strate­gic Ser­vices Agency (SSA), for fail­ing to pro­vide ev­i­dence that repa­tri­at­ed women and chil­dren would pose a na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty risk — an ar­gu­ment of­ten cit­ed to jus­ti­fy the lack of repa­tri­a­tion ef­forts.

Cris­t­ian J. Williams re­it­er­at­ed the call for the pub­lic and po­lit­i­cal ac­tors to re­spect the pri­va­cy of the mi­nors in­volved, em­pha­siz­ing that the fam­i­ly will not be giv­ing in­ter­views at this time. Le­gal en­quiries are be­ing di­rect­ed to Quan­tum Le­gal, while broad­er com­men­tary on gov­ern­men­tal han­dling of the mat­ter will be pro­vid­ed by Ms Khan.