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Gurpreet Singh Johal is sitting in a London hotel lobby the night before he is due to meet David Lammy.
He recalls in his soft Scottish burr that this will be the fifth UK foreign secretary he will have seen in his quest to secure the release of his brother, Jagtar, who has been detained in Indian prisons for seven years, with the case making virtually no progress.
He can rate each foreign secretary’s strengths and weaknesses. Jeremy Hunt, whom he met with Jagtar’s wife, “took me seriously, and registered at that stage, after two years in jail, my brother had not had a fair trial. But he did not take it beyond that.”
Dominic Raab “would not have a meeting. He just wanted a trade deal.” Liz Truss “was sort of forced to have a meeting in 2022, and then she became prime minister and did nothing”.
And then: “James Cleverly – it was the worst meeting of the lot – since all he said was that he would do everything in Jagtar’s best interest. But he said he would not call for his release. I asked him how it could be in my brother’s best interest for his government not to call for his release?”
The argument of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office was that critical comments on the domestic laws of another state might limit the detained Briton’s consular access.
But this experience – a cycle of hope, then hopes dashed, and repeat – is familiar to other families of those who have been detained abroad.
The Foreign Office and British consular services are there to help incarcerated Britons and their relatives. Yet many complain of feeling isolated and unsupported, forced to contend with punitive or highly politicised justice systems, a lack of transparency, dire prison conditions including solitary confinement, or no access to lawyers.
Now a number of relatives, as well as campaigners and MPs, are calling for the Labour government to up its game and usher in a step-change in the handling of hostage situations and other cases of Britons unlawfully held overseas.
Cultural defensiveness
The case of 37-year-old Jagtar Singh Johal, from Dumbarton in Scotland, is particularly galling. He was arrested in connection with targeted killing cases in Punjab in 2016 and 2017 – allegedly part of a conspiracy by the Khalistan Liberation Force, an organisation that Indian police say he was a member of.
Reprieve, the charity supporting him, has insisted the charges are based on a false confession he gave after being tortured with electricity by police, who are also alleged to have brought petrol into the cell and threatened to burn him alive.
For his brother, the exchanges he had with Cleverly – the penultimate in a run of Conservative foreign secretaries involved in the case – represented a step backwards ince Boris Johnson, as prime minister in 2022, had said his brother was arbitrarily detained.
Gurpreet gives credit to the former prime minister David Cameron, the final Tory to hold the role of foreign secretary, who met him in Scotland. “He said to me: ‘The one thing I do not understand is if they have got evidence against your brother, why are they not doing anything? What benefit do they gain?’ And I explained keeping him in jail is a punishment in itself, and that is how the system works.
“It took Cameron to understand that, despite there being a legal case against Jagtar, that if India wanted, they could release him tomorrow and send him back.
“It’s about political will. None of the other foreign secretaries understood that point, but he did. But then the [UK general] election intervened. I genuinely believe he would have done more.”
He recalls that, lower down the ministerial ladder, Rory Stewart as a Foreign Office minister promised in 2017 that “extreme action” would be taken if claims that a British national had been tortured proved to be true. Two months later Stewart switched departments, becoming prisons minister.
“Frankly, Mark Field [another Foreign Office minister] was the best. He was very honest and candid in our first meeting. He said: ‘Keep up the pressure because the more pressure you put on, the more we will do. Without the pressure we won’t do anything.’”
It’s not just the churn in ministers and what can seem like arbitrary inconsistencies in their approach, but the constant swirl of case workers. It makes Johal ensure that everything is in writing so there is a paper trail about what has been promised. “The consular staff often want to have a conversation, but I say I want it in writing to keep them on point,” he says.
Other families of high-profile detainees also complain of a cultural defensiveness and a sense that other unspoken interests are always in play.
In Jagtar’s case there have even been doubts over whether the whole of the government machine was on his side.
Multiple attempts were made to remove his wife from the UK, and some Sikh activists who had campaigned for his release were subject to dawn raids by counter-terrorism police. The UK has never confirmed whether British intelligence acted as an informant to the Indian government in this case.
’They let him down’
Richard Ratcliffe, who held two hunger strikes to secure the return of his wife, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, from Iran after six years, said that trying to discover what lay at the centre of the government’s thinking was like peeling an onion.
It took his own detective work and a tip-off from two foreign diplomats from Oman and Switzerland, rather than a UK Foreign Office disclosure, to realise that a £450m debt owed by the UK to Iran was the barrier to securing her freedom.
Repeated letters sent by his solicitors asking what was being done about the debt were left not just unanswered but often unacknowledged. The government refused to accept the self-evident link between the debt and her detention.
Matthew Hedges, a PhD student detained by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in May 2018 on suspicion of being a spy and released after seven months, always felt the UK’s relations with a close Gulf trading partner inhibited the Foreign Office.
Freedom of Information Act requests revealed that the Foreign Office knew within hours of his arrest that he was being held on national security grounds, yet his case was not immediately elevated.
A rare report by the parliamentary ombudsman in 2023 ordered the Foreign Office to apologise to him. It found Hedges “trusted them to help him and they let him down. Officials failed to notice signs of torture, failed to intervene and failed to help.”
The Foreign Office made many requests to see him in jail in Dubai. He was visited by the officials three times, the first time after two months, and once on the day after he had signed his confession papers.
Hedges feels he survived because of the choices he took, including the confession. “It potentially endangered my life. It certainly endangered the lives of others, who I know were picked up by state security authorities, either in the UK or abroad in Egypt, in Jordan, in Russia, and in Yemen,” he said.
“I tried to reduce the impact on others, but I was also trying, quite literally, to survive.” He is now pursuing the UAE in the French courts.
’Textbook case’
Another case in point is Alaa Abd el-Fattah, the British-Egyptian pro-democracy activist and writer. He was to have completed his five-year prison sentence on 29 September this year but Egyptian officials decided not to count the two years he had spent in pre-trial detention. Egypt does not recognise him as a British national.
John Casson, the former ambassador to Egypt, says Abd el-Fattah’s detention has been “a textbook case” of how to do all the wrong things to put effective pressure on the Egyptian government.
He said the UK sacrifices leverage through “our culture of non-offence, not upsetting people and being seen to say the right thing”, adding: “We don’t think about how to use access and political conversations for leverage.”
The Egyptian foreign ministry is “a pantomime designed to keep foreigners away from the real conversations”. The key levers – British intelligence and the defence industry – operate largely independently of UK diplomats, and are not used to secure releases.
Casson pointed out: “Here we have got Britain’s most fundamental right under the Vienna convention of diplomatic access being denied. We are not being treated as a serious country and allowed access to the British national in prison, and the Egyptian ambassador in London is welcomed cordially.”
While in opposition Lammy, as MP for Abd el-Fattah’s sister Mona Seif, called for reciprocal measures to be applied to the Egyptian embassy in London, saying: “UK officials in Egypt have no consular access to this British national and you’ve got to ask why is it that the Egyptian ambassador has access to Whitehall in those circumstances – I think it should stop.”
Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian-British academic who like Zaghari-Ratcliffe was held in Iran, did not receive any communication from the consular sections of either the British or Australian governments until after four months of interrogation in Iran.
Arm’s length
Of course, securing the release of a Briton in jail is not just a matter of political will. The era of simply demanding that an authoritarian government, ally or foe, should release a British detainee, with the doors to the jail then springing open, have long gone. It takes tact, patience and understanding the motives and weaknesses of the captor.
Many of the cases solved privately are by definition hidden from view. Each case has its unique ingredients, and there are many cases. The Foreign Office says in any given year it supports about 20-25,000 British nationals and their families, including about 4-5,000 detained or arrested abroad. Spotting the high value cases early is key.
Nor is the Foreign Office’s task made easier by the strict rule that ransoms will not be paid by the UK.
But nevertheless, too many times families feel they have not been involved in a shared endeavour, but instead are treated as someone to be kept at arm’s length, just one factor among many to be weighed when shaping the bilateral relationship with a country.
Bland reassurances that an issue has been raised by a minister on such a date on an overseas visit do not assuage the agony of the families or their sense of burning injustice.
‘Counterproductive’
One of the most controversial issues is publicity, and Whitehall’s bias towards quiet diplomacy.
The Labour peer and human rights specialist Helena Kennedy recalls after contacting the Iran desk early in the Zaghari-Ratcliffe case that she was personally visited by officials and told not to go public. Similarly the Foreign Office sought to disrupt Hedges’ efforts to go public, the foreign affairs select committee concluded.
Johal says: “I’ve spoken to other families and they say Foreign Office advice is always: ‘Do not go public. It won’t be beneficial to you.’ Whereas you often didn’t have a choice.
“And genuinely, I believe if I didn’t go loud, my brother would be dead. I was worried he would have a fatal ‘encounter’ with the police. The torture wouldn’t have stopped. It could have cost him his life.”
The quiet diplomacy route forms part of a pattern of refusing to use tools at the Foreign Office’s disposal for fear of damaging bilateral relationships.
In its report entitled Stolen Years, the foreign affairs select committee found: “The Foreign Office has a policy of not commenting on, or interfering with, a foreign state’s legal system.
“For instance the evidence suggests that the existence of an opinion from the UN working group on arbitrary detention that a British national is illegally detained makes little or no tangible difference to the way the [Foreign Office] approaches resolving that case. This is counterproductive and risks undermining an important tool, as well as the government’s commitment to a rules-based international order.”
At one point, ministers became aware that the Foreign Office’s handling of consular cases might be part of a cultural pattern, so in 2019 Hunt appointed a senior diplomat, Dame Judith Macgregor, to conduct a published but largely internal review of how the department dealt with such issues.
The top line finding that “no systematic attempt existed to protect the bilateral relationship at the expense of the individual” disguised her sharp criticism.
It found: “Amongst families there was an admission of a shared belief – albeit with different levels of acceptance – that the Foreign Office was overly sparing with what was revealed to them and when, which had undermined their trust … ”
The department could move from seeking to “manage and contain” complex cases to setting out clearer plans to resolve them. Since then the foreign affairs select committee has produced a damning report informed by the experience of families.
Specialist unit?
So what is the solution? When in opposition, the twofold solution that the Labour party alighted on was a legal right to consular access, included in the Labour manifesto, and a US-style special envoy for hostages, dedicated to pursuing these cases.
In the US, one of the few Trump appointments kept on by the Biden administration, Roger Carstens, is seen as a success as the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs.
Carstens has clearly been effective, and the existence of a specialist unit “would be very reassuring to those who didn’t know where to go and who to talk to, or how to manage those things”, Lady Kennedy said.
“The Foreign Office will say it does not need specialist units and everyone is trained to handle consular cases, but there are specialist units dealing with atrocity crimes and sexual violence in conflict.”
She added: “I’m afraid there is a reticence in this country to fall out with the people that we do business with.”
Johal encapsulates the level of frustration for those who feel trapped in a nightmare. “I was born and brought up here. I expected my country to look after me, and it’s not happened,” he said.
“So I’ve been campaigning for the last seven years, not just against the Indian government, but for the UK government to do a lot more.
“And I think that’s totally unfair, because other countries like America go out of their way to help the citizens, whereas the UK government has not. I genuinely believe it is because they put a trade deal first.”
He added: “Some people in the community feel like I have got as far because I am a lawyer. But I was never trained to do this. I have had to learn as I go along. Too often you feel like you are someone to be handled, not confided in. I just have to hope with Lammy it is different.”