Consular Support for British Citizens

I beg to move,

That this House regrets that the consular services provided by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) to bereaved families of people who have been murdered, have died in suspicious circumstances, or have been imprisoned or tortured overseas have fallen short of the standard reasonably expected; notes that access to justice and basic standards of assistance are dependent upon a person’s ability to pay; is concerned that there is no legal right to consular assistance and that support is provided on a discretionary basis, which can lead to unpredictable and inconsistent communications from the FCDO; further regrets that consular services in the UK are below the level of support UK citizens should expect; believes that the FCDO’s focus is on what it cannot do to help, rather than what it can do, which adds to the trauma experienced by victims; calls on the Government to improve and standardise communication processes at the FCDO, to publish consular procedures and policies and to revisit the findings of the Fifth Report of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Support for British nationals abroad: The Consular Service, Session 2014-15, HC 516; further calls on the Government to consult with the families affected and to raise the standard of how British citizens are treated by FCDO procedures; and urges the Government to set a world leading example of how a state treats its citizens in their darkest hour of need.

It is a great privilege and pleasure to move this motion on a very serious issue: consular support for British citizens. If the Chair will allow me, I would like to share the experience of someone whose loved one died abroad. You’ve gone to Paris for the weekend. It is your husband’s birthday and you are going to celebrate. You get to Paris and you’re having a lovely time. Your son and daughter and their partners are with you. Between the restaurant and the hotel, your husband is attacked at random. He didn’t see it coming, none of you did, and he was so brutally beaten that he was taken to hospital and put on a life support machine. Your son and son-in-law were also attacked and taken to the hospital. You arrived at the hospital to find you could not understand the language. You were asked to sign a document but it wasn’t in English. You couldn’t read it and you were panicking as it related to your husband’s care. You’re in shock. It’s night time. It’s dark. What do you do? You decide to call the British embassy—they’ll know what to do. But it’s closed because it’s Saturday night and not open again until Monday.

Monday comes and your husband’s life support machine has been turned off. You didn’t get a choice in the matter. The rules are different in France to the UK. You are devastated. Your husband, whose birthday you were coming to celebrate, has been murdered. You manage to contact the embassy on Monday, and they tell you they’re sorry to hear what’s happened but they can’t help you and you’ll need to find a lawyer. They agree to send you a list though, and you get a piece of paper with some names in French and phone numbers. You ring the first one. You try to explain your husband has been murdered, and the lawyer on the other end tells you he is too busy to take the case. Your daughter calls the next one, and they ask for €1,000 up front and all documents in the case. You go to the hospital, where you are handed a report, but you can’t read it because it’s in French. You call the embassy, who say they don’t deal with translation and you’ll need to organise that yourself.

You go to the police station, where no one can tell you what will happen next and whether the criminals who attacked your family will be traced. You tell them what happened, and are asked to sign a document that you can’t read. You ask for a translation, and they cannot help you. You need to get back home because you can’t afford to stay. You don’t want to leave your husband and your son, because he is still in intensive care. Someone pleasant at the embassy agrees to drive you to the airport. They tell you that that’s not part of their job description and they’re doing it as a favour because they feel sorry for you, but please do not mention it to anyone.

You get back to London. Queuing for the flight check-in, you have two suitcases: yours and your husband’s. When you get to the desk, you are told there will be a charge because you have extra luggage. On the flight, someone from the airline announces, “Welcome on board. We hope you enjoyed your trip.” You get home, you call the Foreign Office. Someone asks you to explain what’s happened, and you give them the details and have to relive it all. They say they aren’t the person who can help but someone will ring you back tomorrow. The next day, no one phones.

You call back and get someone else who asks you to go through the story again. They ask whether you had insurance and whether you plan to get the body home or not. If you do not have insurance, you will have to find the money for repatriation yourself, but you will need to speak to a funeral director about that, and they will send you a bereavement pack—“What’s your email address?” After you have called your insurance company, you call the funeral director to go through organising repatriation. Imagine for just a second that you do not have insurance and instead have to set up a crowdfunding page to ask any generous members of the public for enough to get your partner back so that you can have a funeral.

You were due back to work on Monday. You do not know what your own name is or what day of the week it is, let alone are able to go to work, so you arrange to see your GP, who signs you off sick. You cannot work and your husband was the main source of income in your household. The French lawyer is asking lots of questions and spending a lot of time on your case, and you want justice, so there are legal fees, travel and a lot of stress and trauma ahead. You feel so alone. This cannot be right.

You are at home now and you are watching the news of a young girl who has fallen from a balcony in suspicious circumstances overseas. The news presenter says, “We asked the Foreign Office for comment and they said, ‘We’re assisting the family at this difficult time.’” You wonder what assistance they are getting that you are not. You decide to set up your own charity to ensure that families are supported in future. It is too late for yours, but God forbid some other poor family has to suffer this alone. Let us make sure this does not happen again.

Murdered Abroad was set up in 2001 by Eve Henderson. Death Abroad You’re Not Alone was set up in 2013 by Julie Love, whose son Colin tragically drowned in water that was deemed safe off the coast of a Venezuelan island. The Kirsty Maxwell Charity was set up by my constituents Brian and Denise Curry, Kirsty’s parents, who want to help others who suffer such a traumatic loss of a loved one abroad. The Lucie Blackman Trust was formed after the brutal attack on Lucie Blackman in Japan in 2000. The Jessica Lawson Retreat was set up by her family as a retreat for those bereaved after Jessica tragically drowned on a school trip in France in 2015, and they continue to campaign on water-safety issues. The British Rights Abroad Group was set up by the families of Nazanin Zaghari-Radcliffe and Matthew Hedges to campaign for and represent the families of those held illegally abroad.

All those are services set up by families who are devastated by the loss or incarceration of a loved one, and they are now plugging the Government’s gaps. They do incredible work, and I pay tribute to them. There will always be a place for such charities and organisations, but they should not have to be picking up the pieces of a Government’s failings.

I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Member’s powerful speech, but I thank her for securing this debate. She knows very well the case of my constituent, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, having spoken in support of her release in several debates. The hon. Lady may be aware that the Government granted Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe diplomatic protection in 2019, but three years on almost nothing has been done to use the protection that was bestowed on her to bring her home. The Government have been unwilling to assert their right to consular access to Nazanin, to challenge Iran’s unlawful behaviour at the International Court of Justice, or to use their right under the Vienna convention to request private consular meetings with the Iranian regime. Does the hon. Member agree that the Government risk undermining the UK’s diplomatic protection by failing to utilise it in my constituent’s case?

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention and pay tribute to her work on behalf of Nazanin, Richard and their family. I wholeheartedly agree with her and will address some of those points in my speech.

The experience that I just shared with the Chamber is just one of the many devastating accounts that I have heard since I started to work on this issue. Let me take a moment to thank the Backbench Business Committee and all who will speak today and who have supported this work. I give thanks to Eve Henderson of Murdered Abroad, to Julie Love of Death Abroad You’re Not Alone, to Redress, to Miles Manning, to Stewarts Law, to the British Rights Abroad Group and to all who have contributed to the preparation for today and who, in their own ways, advocate for different parts of the broader issue we are debating.

I also thank, if the House will indulge me for just a moment, my constituency team, who have worked tirelessly on this issue. When we set up the all-party parliamentary group on deaths abroad, consular services and assistance, we did not deploy an organisation to support us because we felt the issue was too sensitive, so my own team has taken evidence and worked on this issue. I thank Marcus Woods, Sabrina Rossetti, Chloe McLellan and Adam Robinson, and specifically Stephanie McTighe, my chief of staff, and Michelle Rodger, my former comms manager. Michelle passed away from cancer in August this year. She believed passionately in this work and in this issue. She is much missed by all in my team.

When we founded the all-party group and took evidence from more than 60 families and 30 organisations, Michelle was very much at the heart of this work. She sat in on every session, diligently recording and taking note of the devastating experiences and making sure that they were properly reflected in the report that we wrote and published at the end of 2019. Why did we do that? It was because, like all Members across this House, I have constituents who have been left devastated by the murder, suspicious death, incarceration or loss of a family member abroad. In their time of most desperate need, they face a lack of support from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Julie Pearson was killed in Israel in 2015 and Kirsty Maxwell was killed in Benidorm, Spain, in 2016. They were two devastating constituency cases of young women taken in their prime in the most distressing and violent ways imaginable and the families left without the support they needed. The families coming forward to get support highlighted the issue to me. I come to this debate and indeed these issues genuinely in the spirit of co-operation, as a critical friend. I genuinely want to work with Government to make the system better for families, consular staff, civil servants and all those whose lives are touched by this issue. It is those families who are really at the heart of the all-party group’s work. I thank all of them for the time that they have spent with my team and me. They have given evidence and shared their traumatic experiences, and they live with a huge gap in their lives.

I start by expressing my gratitude for the opportunity to take part in this debate. I thank the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) and the Backbench Business Committee for bringing such an important issue to the Chamber. It is really important to be able to discuss it and the specific cases that we have probably all come across.

I want to raise the case of one of my constituents, Dr Ding Col Dau Ding, a British citizen who died in South Sudan in 2015. His brother is a doctor working in the NHS. They lived in Cromer on the North Norfolk coast. The circumstances surrounding his death, and possible murder, remain, more than six years later, unclear and unanswered. Dr Ding was a highly qualified medical doctor and brain surgeon also working in the NHS, and was by all accounts an extraordinary man. I know that his passing is felt as strongly today as it was six years ago. His friends and family have, for many years now, sought answers and justice, but they have neither.

The British Embassy in Juba was seemingly making progress, with the former ambassador expressing his own concern over the death of Dr Ding. However, the efforts to ascertain the facts surrounding the death of a British citizen have plateaued since that ambassador’s end of tenure in 2017. I hope that raising Dr. Ding’s case today on the Floor of the House will lead to it being revisited with renewed vigour and a concern to mirror that of his family and friends. I am sure I speak for everybody here when I say that to lose a son, a brother or a loved one is one thing, but to do so in the absence of understanding and justice is a burden that no family should bear.

I therefore ask the Minister to unequivocally assure me that everything possible can be done to help Dr Ding’s family and friends to receive the answers and the justice that they deserve. Will she agree to meet me and the Ding family? I want to ensure that everything possible can be done to support the late Dr Ding’s family and friends and to help bring them very much needed closure.

First, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) for securing this debate. It is a tremendously important issue that we need to discuss. If we can work on a cross-party basis, we need to impress on the Minister, if nothing else, the seriousness of these types of case and how they stand out from the bulk of our casework.

My constituent David Cornock’s son was murdered in Thailand in 2019. He did not commit suicide, as the official police report suggested. The official police report was extremely unconvincing and made no effort to be anything other than that. As with my hon. Friend’s constituent’s experience, there is an immediate and natural assumption that one should turn to the Foreign Office, thinking, “They will know what to do. They’ve been here before. How could I understand how to navigate this myself? Who would? Who could?” They turned to the Foreign Office and at every turn, the door was very politely closed, saying, “There is nothing we can do”, “That is not our responsibility”, and, “Here is a list of lawyers.”

When I heard my hon. Friend talk about the list of lawyers, my heart sank, because I have been through the list of lawyers merry-go-round with my constituent. On it were 10 lawyers in Thailand—six did not respond, two claimed they could not speak English, and the other two wanted £25,000 up front. I accept that it is hard for the Foreign Office to find lawyers in every single country around the world, but it should accept that, too, and stop offering the list. Offering false, empty help is worse than no help at all, and that is the message I want to get through to the Minister.

The Minister will take to her feet, and I know what she will say. She will tell us that she understands. She will tell us that these are very trying cases, not just for the families, but for any MP who has to try to support their constituents in these testing matters. If that is what she will say—I am sure it is—she should take a look at the service provided now and change it, because we live in a society where people can travel to all corners of the Earth if they have the means. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office needs to update its systems and processes to make sure that things are realistic.

As if I have not already said enough, I feel compelled to intervene specifically on the issue of Thailand. We took evidence from a number of families whose loved ones died in Thailand. The level of corruption and lack of support were galling. They felt that things had moved on a little bit, because the advice on the Foreign Office website had improved a little, but there is clearly a gulf, I am sure my hon. Friend would agree, between that advice and the real experiences of our families in Thailand.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is why I go back to my insistence that the Foreign Office accept the request to look again at how it seeks to support—that is with a very small “s”—people in these circumstances. It would be far better not to compound people’s distress and devastation at the death of a loved one by giving the impression of being a helpful organisation when in actual fact, I am sorry, it is anything but—certainly not in the experience of my constituent. Honesty needs to be rewoven through the support that the FCDO provides. The trauma of repatriating one’s loved one’s body, the difficulty of death certificates and the impossible merry-go-round of post-mortems—those things are challenging in any respect, but in this context they are utterly horrifying.

I will wrap it up there. I hope I have conveyed the seriousness with which I and other hon. and right hon. Members view this issue. I hope that the Minister can assure us that something can change about this process.

I commend the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell). All hon. Members present bring examples to the Chamber of such things happening to constituents. She has every reason to be proud of her staff, especially that staff member who did much work and gave much commitment. We are all proud of that staff member too because of what she has done.

It is an emotive topic because of the issues that it pertains to, which each of us have as local and elected representatives. I well remember a young constituent, Daniel, coming into my office with the news that his father had been found dead in Spain under suspicious circumstances. He had no idea what to do. That goes back to the point that other hon. Members have made, including the hon. Member for Angus (Dave Doogan), that it is about knowing what to do. I felt, as my constituent did, that the British consulate would be able to help, but it could not.

Daniel did not know what questions to ask or who to ask them of and, importantly, he had no clue about how to get his dad home. His pain and uncertainty were difficult to see, and harder still because we had no ready-made pathway to access to help him and his family. My office worked with the British consulate, and the people there were absolute professionals, but perhaps they did not have the knowledge or expertise. Such things do not happen all the time, but when they do, we must be able to respond. Undoubtedly, however, their hands were somewhat tied and their roles were ambiguous.

I know what the hon. Member for Livingston wants to do, and what I, other hon. Members and the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West), want to do through the debate. We look to the Minister for an encouraging response that will give us some support and confidence in how the process will work from now on. We need to improve it. With that in mind, there is a piece of work to be done to define roles and to provide the services that people need in time of trauma.

It is always good to follow the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), and I hope his new blue passport will open up doors on the issue we are discussing today—even though the passports are made in France.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) and their staff—their team; I hate the word “staff”—for the immense work they have done on behalf of the all-party parly group on deaths abroad, consular services and assistance, of which I am also a member. I also thank the all-party parliamentary group for coming together in a cross-party sense to discuss an issue that crosses the desks of Members of this House more regularly than ever before. Importantly, I also thank the families that gave evidence to the all-party group. I want to specifically concentrate on the families of my constituents: Lisa Brown, believed murdered in Spain, is still missing and Jagtar Singh Johal is being arbitrarily detained in the Republic of India, now for a fourth year.

Let me take Lisa’s family’s case first. I have been part of it since her sister and brother first came to me and my team. Their experience is in some ways not dissimilar to that of the vast majority of those who seek Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office support for someone believed murdered and missing abroad. There was limited information via a consular office in a location with a high percentage of UK nationals either living there or on holiday. There was scrabbling around for translators and lawyers. All the while the family were dealing with the trauma of a missing sister presumed murdered who has a young son left behind. Sadly, the case of Lisa is still open. During this time Lisa’s mother sadly died without the answers she and the rest of Lisa’s family have required.

Then there is the case of Jagtar Singh Johal, with which I hope the Chamber is well acquainted, who was abducted in the streets of the Republic of India, with an accusation of torture against the state of India, an ally and a member of the Commonwealth. No charges have yet been placed, there is consistent postponement by Indian judicial authorities every time the case comes to court, and there has been the familiar “We can’t do this and we can’t do that” approach over a broad swathe of the period of his detention.

My hon. Friend’s point about tourism hotspots, and Spain particularly, is really important. I went to Madrid with my chief of staff, Stephanie, and met the ambassador and the staff in the embassy and the consulate who deliver the services. They could see the value and the opportunity in improving services and communication and in having a proper link-up. That is one of the recommendations that we want to put in place—a protocol to ensure that people travelling from the UK to Spain have a higher level of service, because so many tourists go there from Britain.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, which makes my point. If the United Kingdom Government want to be global Britain, they should be the global Britain of the 21st century, not buccaneers going into the Caribbean or the Indo-Pacific. This really is about recognising what is happening to citizens on the ground on a regular basis. As my hon. Friend the Member for Angus (Dave Doogan) alluded to, it is not irregular to hear of these cases anymore. It is not regular, but it is not irregular and we, as Members, face these tasks on a more regular basis.

Finally, let me pay tribute not only to the family of Lisa Brown and Jagtar Singh Johal, but to all the families mentioned in the report. I hope the Minister will understand that it comes from a place of wanting to work together, so that no other family is left without access to appropriate support, that no other person is left in a hospital dead with their family having to have crowdfunders to bring them home, and that families are met if they are going to visit someone in prison, whether it be in the Republic of India, Iran, Australia or the United States. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Livingston for securing this debate.

It is a real delight to be here this afternoon contributing to this debate and to hear the way the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) introduced her poignant remarks relating to her constituent. We heard about the important work of the all-party parliamentary group on deaths abroad, consular services and assistance, and the work the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes) has done not just through the APPG but on behalf of his constituent, who is now very well known to those of us who have been here since 2015—I believe the hon. Member was in the same intake as me—listening to Jagtar Singh Johal’s story. I hope the Minister can give us some enlightened news in that regard.

Quite rightly, whenever citizens face difficulty or are caught up in a crisis in any part of the world, they look to the embassy and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office for support. We heard from the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Duncan Baker) about the need we, as Members of Parliament, have for the reassurance that our constituents are being looked after when they are in trouble. We firmly believe that the Government always have a moral duty to support and protect UK citizens abroad, particularly in times of crisis. The hon. Members for Angus (Dave Doogan) and for Strangford (Jim Shannon) spoke movingly about their constituents and their concern.

For much of the time, the support given by embassies through the FCDO is timely and appropriate. That is due to the commitment and dedication of FCDO and consulate staff. I know all Members will join me in thanking them for their tireless work day in, day out in very stressful circumstances to help our constituents. That said, we know of some cases where we feel even more could be done. My hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) has a very well-known case. She and my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby) still have constituents in prison in Iran. We know well the stories of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, but there are others. The Minister will be aware of them.