British Nationals Detained Overseas

I beg to move,

That this House has considered British nationals detained overseas.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Ms Ali. The first duty of the British Government is to protect their citizens at home and abroad. Being arrested or detained abroad can be a difficult and traumatic experience. Often the detained are unable to see their friends and family, sometimes for years. I am sure that we were all moved by the scenes of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe being reunited with her husband Richard and their daughter Gabriella.

Iran has shown itself to be a serial offender of detaining British passport holders. Morad Tahbaz, a British-American citizen, is still detained there. It has now been over five years. It was only last month that Tahbaz was taken out of Evin prison, the infamous home to many political prisoners of the autocratic regime, and placed under house arrest. Yet this occurred only after America agreed to a prisoner exchange and to allow the Iranian regime to access almost £5 billion of frozen assets in South Korea. In other words, the Iranian regime was using foreign prisoners for ransom. The situation with Nazanin was the same: she was released only after the Government paid £400 million to Tehran.

Mehran Raoof is another dual British-Iranian national who has been detained. At 66, he was detained in Evin prison for supporting and campaigning for workers’ rights. In his own letter, Mr Raoof says the Iranian regime is treating dual nationals as “a valuable commodity”, and the evidence backs him up.

The UK Government must look at the actions of Iran and label them for what they are: state hostage taking. Quite frankly, it is working. The Iranian regime is getting vast sums of money to release foreign or dual nationals whom they have arrested on trumped-up charges. The Foreign Office needs to take a much stronger stance within our role in the UN to call out state hostage taking.

Iran is not the only country guilty of unjustly detaining British citizens. Jimmy Lai, a British national and long-time critic of the Chinese Communist party, was arrested in Hong Kong over three years ago.

I congratulate the hon. Lady for securing the debate and highlighting these important issues and individual cases of concern. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on media freedom, I share her specific concern about the case of Jimmy Lai. Does she agree that Mr Lai’s case is not only one of appalling consequences for him personally, having served nearly 1,000 days in prison, but emblematic of the Hong Kong Government’s crusade against free media and freedom of speech?

I certainly agree with the hon. Gentleman’s comments. Mr Lai is accused of violating the new national security law in Hong Kong. Leaving aside our Government’s failure to properly hold China to account for reneging on the Sino-British joint declaration, there is still a duty to protect British nationals. Mr Lai awaits trial this month, yet the Chinese Communist authorities are trying to block his attempt to hire a British defence lawyer.

My hon. Friend raises an important point about people’s access to justice and consular services when detained illegitimately or even legitimately. Other countries require a minimum level of support from their Foreign Offices and consular services, including the provision of approved lawyers. That would mean lawyers approved in other countries but certified by Britain. Is that something that we should consider doing in order to ensure that our consular services are protecting our nationals wherever they are?

I agree with my hon. Friend; of course we should be doing that. It is about justice, not rigged justice.

The use of foreign lawyers by both prosecution and defence is a long-established tradition in Hong Kong. Only last month, the Foreign Secretary met the Chinese Vice-President, Mr Han, known as the architect of China’s crackdown in Hong Kong. The Foreign Secretary raised the case of Mr Lai, but did not go far enough. It is British values that are on trial: the values of freedom and democracy, which we signed a treaty to uphold. The Prime Minister should raise this with the Chinese regime at the highest possible level.

Cases of British citizens being detained abroad are not limited to the middle east and Asia. In 2021, Mr Nnamdi Kanu, a British citizen, was abducted by Nigerian security forces in Nairobi, Kenya. Since his detention, he has been subjected to torture and many other unpleasantries. A United Nations Human Rights Council report released a damning assessment of the Nigerian Government’s treatment and called for his immediate release.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) has worked tirelessly on behalf of Mr Kanu and is urging the Foreign Secretary to do more to secure his release. Nigeria is a Commonwealth nation that receives tens of millions in UK aid; it is one of the biggest beneficiaries. As part of that aid support, there must be a commitment to human rights and upholding the right to a fair trial. Mr Kanu must be given access to a fair and due process. A British citizen travelling on a British passport should not be kidnapped in a third country and dragged to a Nigerian prison. The Government need to get much tougher.

Another case I will raise is that of Alaa Abd-El Fattah, a British-Egyptian activist who was detained in Egypt. Once again, he has been detained and denied fair and due process. He even took to hunger strike in prison to protest against his treatment. The Egyptian authorities also denied his British citizenship and refused British consular support. Our Government need to insist that Mr Abd-El Fattah gets that assistance.

I remind all hon. Members who wish to speak to bob. I call Daniel Kawczynski.

Thank you, Ms Ali, for calling me to speak in this debate. I very much agree with the comments of the hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) about the importance of how a country supports its citizens overseas when they are in distress, in particular in prisons. I congratulate her on securing this important debate.

I will speak briefly on behalf of my constituent, Saiful Chowdhury, who is a leading member of the Muslim community in Shrewsbury and does a great deal to support our mosque. He contacted me because of his two cousins, Murad Rahman Khan and Yadur Rahman Khan. They were at the airport in Dubai in February 2023, trying to secure a wheelchair for their elderly mother. They were travelling as a family, with their elderly mother and their children, on holiday in Dubai. They tried to secure a wheelchair because their mother had difficulties walking, but the staff were unhelpful, rude and confrontational.

Unfortunately, that led to a verbal confrontation between the two British citizens and the airport staff, resulting in them being convicted to a six-month jail sentence. They are appealing, but their passports have been stamped to prevent them from leaving the United Arab Emirates. They are in a hotel at their own expense. They have spent thousands and thousands pounds already on accommodation since February, while they wait for their court process to be concluded.

The Minister is a very good and responsive Minister, and I would like him to take a particular interest in this case. The reason why I feel compelled to raise it is that some of the allegations put forward include no CCTV evidence being presented to the court. The defendants are keen for that to be shown to demonstrate that the altercation was purely verbal, rather than physical in any way, and yet the authorities refuse to allow CCTV evidence from the airport. That is the allegation. Another concern relates to the repeated refusal of the Emirati authorities to facilitate ongoing and effective dialogue and communication with the defendants, our British embassy officials and indeed their lawyers. My concern is also about the length of time taken to date.

I call Sir Chris Bryant.

Thank you for calling me to speak, Ms Ali. I had not expected to be called so quickly.

I warmly commend my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) for securing this debate, not least because I think all the members of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs have been making arguments about some of the issues for some considerable time.

In particular, there was the situation of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. The former Prime Minister managed to make things more difficult when, as Foreign Secretary, he suggested to the Foreign Affairs Committee that she was engaged in other activities. That possibly led to her being kept in an Iranian jail for much longer than was necessary. In addition, as the current Chancellor admitted when he was Foreign Secretary, sometimes we have not devoted enough energy to making sure that British citizens get a fair trial and are treated properly in prison, or that, if possible, their sentence can be served in the UK.

I will very briefly explain one of the things that I did when I was a Foreign Office Minister for five minutes. There was a British woman who was arrested in Laos. I will not name her, but she was pregnant, and she was arrested for an offence that would have been an offence in the United Kingdom. Laos is a very closed country, politically—a communist country and very difficult. At the time, we did not have an embassy in Laos and we were being helped by the Australians. I said, “Well, I’m sorry, but she’s pregnant; I don’t want a British child to be born in a Laos prison, in filthy conditions, and likely to have a miserable life, if a life of any kind at all. I want that child to be born in a British prison.” All the officials said, “No, that is nonsense, Minister. It is nothing to do with you. It will simply make life difficult.” But I went and I had a difficult but good, thorough meeting with my counterpart in Vientiane. We had a wonderful lunch afterwards, and it thawed the relationship. I said, “I’m going to ring you every Monday morning.” That is what I did, and after three months we got her out and she came back to a British prison. She has no idea; I am absolutely sure of that.

I am very much enjoying the hon. Gentleman’s speech. Three Sundays ago, we joined the fastest-growing, biggest trading bloc in the world—the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-pacific partnership in the far east. Does he agree that we ought to use our position in the CPTPP to restrict Chinese entry to the bloc as long as it continues to behave in this manner?

Yes, and not only because of the sanctioning of the right hon. and hon. Members present but because of the complete reneging on our agreement with China on Hong Kong. When I talk to Hongkongers who have left Hong Kong, who now nearly all leave with nothing, leaving everything behind them, they talk of genuine fear for their family back at home, if they have stayed.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Of course, although I was going to end my speech.

I am sure the hon. Gentleman will get there eventually. I fear that the reasons for the non-intervention and non-comment in respect of Jimmy Lai’s case are explicable—they are not worthy but they are explicable—but this is a moment that really matters for Jimmy Lai, because he now has a trial date set for December, and an intervention at this critical stage in the criminal proceedings against him could make a material difference to the outcome. Does that in itself not merit a more robust intervention from our Foreign Secretary?

I think it does, and I was going to make that point myself. This is a very opportune point at which to make an intervention.

I have another, broader point to make, which is that when people around the world are asked to name the UK’s unique special achievement in foreign affairs, most say it is the rule of law. It is the fact that our word is our bond. It is the fact that a case can be prosecuted properly in a legal court in our country, and that we stand for democracy, the freedom of the individual and equality under the law. That has to be just as much part of our foreign policy as our mercantilist desire to do better trade with other parts of the world. My experience of working on issues in Russia and countries in central Asia is that if we do not tie the two together, we make a terrible mistake, because British businesses simply cannot flourish because they have to pay bribes and deal with an autocratic regime.

To conclude, I very much hope that the UK Government will adopt a more robust, more coherent and more determined approach in their relationship with a series of different countries: China, Russia and India.