That this House is concerned by the number of arbitrarily detained British nationals at risk of human rights abuses abroad and the apparent lack of active support for those detained; and calls on the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to provide regular reports on when it last raised the cases of those people with its international counterparts.
I am enormously pleased that the Backbench Business Committee agreed to find sufficient time to debate this issue. Too often, the issue of British citizens detained abroad gets washed away in all the other debates, no matter who is in government. As I have said before, regardless of who is sitting on the Government Benches—be they Conservative, Labour or whatever—I tend to find myself in opposition on issues such as this, as do many Members here. We have serious concerns that the issue is not raised enough, and cases are locked behind a wall of silence. I want to change that today.
My intention is to call on the Government, first of all, to provide regular reports—something they never do —on when the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office last raised the cases of British nationals who are arbitrarily detained abroad and at risk of human rights abuses. Individuals detained abroad are particularly vulnerable to torture, ill treatment and other serious human rights violations from the moment that they are detained. At least 100 UK nationals are tortured or ill treated abroad every year. In 2023, the FCDO received 188 new allegations of torture and mistreatment from British nationals overseas. It goes on and on.
Arbitrary detention and hostage-taking are devastating, but are practised by a number of regimes, chief among those being Iran. That is devastating for the individuals affected and their families. Survivors bear the physical, psychological and socioeconomic scars of their captivity. Survivors’ families also endure significant psychological distress, often facing vicarious trauma as they fight for their loved ones’ release and feeling that they are fighting a losing battle against even the establishment here in the United Kingdom.
The support that the British Government can provide to their nationals in these harrowing circumstances is crucial. They are sometimes the only link between the individual and the outside world.
The right hon. Member mentioned support from the British Government. Does he agree that that support is not always as consistent across the globe as we might like and as many members of the public would imagine it to be? There is no guarantee or legal right imposed on the UK Government to do it in the way that there is, for example, on the American Government. Does he think that the situation is unsatisfactory and, if so, what does he think the Government should do about it?
I completely agree. I have no problem agreeing on this matter. It has been a long-standing issue for families and Members of Parliament that, somehow, the FCDO puts a cloud of obscurity in the way of real knowledge about what is going on. For families, that can be incredibly difficult.
The right hon. Member may be aware of the case of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, a British national who remains in an Egyptian prison. Like me, is he very concerned that Mr el-Fattah’s mother, Laila Soueif, who is 68 years old, is now on the 67th day of a hunger strike? As I understand it, the Foreign Secretary last raised the case on 14 November. Does the right hon. Member agree that more needs to be done beyond just raising the case?
I absolutely agree. That case will be raised today. All of us who want to speak in the debate have agreed that we will make sure that individual cases are raised in detail. I will touch on some to summarise them, and I will detail a couple of them. The hon. Lady is quite right. What has happened is appalling, and we need to ensure that more is done—that is critical.
Those who fall prey to detentions are too often let down by British Governments. I say, without let or hindrance, that that includes the Conservative Government who were in office previously, the Labour Governments before that and the present Labour Government. I hope that will now change.
The Foreign Secretary recently confirmed that there are 28,000 prisoners in the system, yet the Foreign Office refuses to disclose exactly how many are British nationals who are being arbitrarily detained. Why not? What is so ground-shaking about discovering who the British nationals are, for goodness’ sake? I hope the Minister will agree that it is essential that the Government publish data on the number of British citizens who are arbitrarily detained or held hostage abroad. Sadly, there are British nationals in arbitrary detention in repressive countries all over the world. Quite often, we are not aware of them. As I said in response to the hon. Lady, those cases will be raised.
With your indulgence, Madam Deputy Speaker, I remind the House that family members are watching this debate from the Gallery. I will quickly name them, if that is all right with everyone here. We are joined by Omar Robert Hamilton, Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s cousin, and Sanaa Seif, Alaa’s sister. We are joined by supporters and family members of Ryan Cornelius. I am deeply sorry that Ryan’s wife, Heather Cornelius, is unable to join us today, but Ryan’s brother-in-law, Chris Pagett, and his wife Diana are with us, as well as Ryan’s sister-in-law, Wendy Thompson, and her husband David. Also sitting in the Gallery is Matthew Hedges, a victim of arbitrary detention in the United Arab Emirates, and Peter Humphrey, a former prisoner of China.
The right hon. Member mentioned the families who are here today to listen to this debate, and in doing so highlighted the impact on not just those detained or held hostage but their loved ones, friends and family. I take the opportunity to invite him to recognise the family and friends of British-linked hostages held in Gaza—Oded Lifschitz, Eli Sharabi, Avinatan Or and Emily Damari—and their cases.
I was going to say it, but as the hon. Member has raised it, I will do so now: we must not forget those hostages. What has happened to them is appalling, and he is right to raise it. Families across the UK listening to this debate will be appreciative of that.
A critical issue is the lack of a clear and proactive response strategy from the FCDO. There is no centralised approach for dealing with arbitrary detention cases, and that absence of structure adds to the stress for families, who feel unsupported and often ignored.
My right hon. Friend’s point is surely the critical one. Traditionally, the best and the brightest went into the diplomatic service and the Foreign Office intake, but even the brightest people need to specialise if they are to do a good job. Given that so many people are being detained in this way, surely the answer is to have a small dedicated unit within the Foreign Office that can handle the co-ordination of a systematic response every time someone is arbitrarily detained abroad.
I agree with my right hon. Friend. The point I am really getting at is that the days of the shifting jobs of generalists are long gone, I am afraid. I have often made the case, having run a Department, that the civil service and the Foreign Office need to catch up with what is happening outside. We need specialists in place, and we need that to be considered an important job.
In cases where British nationals are detained abroad, the families of those detained have often found the UK Government reluctant to act to prevent torture or to seek accountability where it occurs. If they are acting, they do not relay that to the families, so the families are left believing that nothing has happened, even if something has happened. For instance, when Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian dual citizen, was detained in Iran, her family first raised allegations of torture with the FCDO in 2017. It was not until May 2021—following outside pressure from Redress and others, by way of a submission to the FCDO of a medical report as evidence of her severe suffering—that the then Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, an old colleague of ours, acknowledged that she had been a victim of torture. Why did it take so long? It seems to me that this is pointless.
In the case of Jagtar Singh Johal, a British national tortured by police in India, FCDO officials would only raise the allegations of torture with the Indian authorities once they had sought consent from him directly, which took two to three months. I know that the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Douglas McAllister) intends to speak about that case, but I just raise it generally as an illustration of what is going wrong.
Families of detainees face significant challenges in their engagement with the FCDO. Many report vague or inconsistent communication, which breeds mistrust. There is a critical need for a designated point of contact for families, as happens in the States, to ensure transparency and accountability in the handling of cases. Without that, families feel abandoned by their own Government while simultaneously battling the detaining state with few tools.
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that it does not matter whether someone is a dual national or not? If they are British, they are British and they are proud to be British. We should simply talk about them being British citizens, and not even bother talking about dual nationals.
I could not agree more with the right hon. Lady, and I welcome her to the debate as Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. She is absolutely right, but the problem in this case is that dual nationality was used as an excuse for why the Government did not want to raise the matter, because China did not recognise that British citizenship. She is right that if someone is a British citizen, they are a British citizen, and the inside of the passport tells us why that is important. It seems to be ignored too often.
We know that sanctions are a vital tool for deterring and punishing state actors involved in arbitrary detention, yet that tool is often underutilised by UK Governments. I will touch on that later, because compared with the Americans, we fail to utilise it as a possible way to leverage changes to what is going on outside.
Another area of concern is the inconsistent application of Government policy regarding international legal standards. When the Minister comes to the Dispatch Box, will he confirm the Government’s official definition of arbitrary detention? How does it align with international legal standards, such as those established by the United Nations working group on arbitrary detention? I have never been able to get an answer out of any Foreign Minister yet, but I ask him, given his experience in the Department, to kindly find out the definition for us and let us know.
I said I would raise specific cases, so I will run through some of the list. Ryan Cornelius is a British citizen unjustly detained in Dubai for more than 16 years, originally in isolation. His case represents an egregious violation of human rights and, importantly, of due process. He was arrested in 2008 on false fraud allegations relating to a $500 million Dubai Islamic Bank loan, and his 10-year sentence was extended by 20 years in 2018 through retroactive application of a new law without proper legal proceedings. The bank seized assets worth $1.6 billion from Mr Cornelius, far exceeding the original loan amount. The UN working group on arbitrary detention has ruled categorically that Ryan’s detention is arbitrary and in violation of international law, calling for his immediate release and compensation. However, there still appears to be FCDO resistance.
I thank the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) for securing today’s incredibly important debate, and the Backbench Business Committee for allowing us the time to debate it.
Throughout my time in Parliament, I have seen far too many sad and desperate families protesting outside the Foreign Office; going on hunger strike; standing for election against the Prime Minister, as one of my constituents did in support of Andy Tsege; singing Christmas carols, as I did outside the Foreign Office in support of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe; and organising petitions. They do everything they can to get their loved ones back, believing—rightly or wrongly—that the Foreign Office genuinely does not seem to be doing enough, and does not seem to care.
The public understandably have huge amounts of sympathy for these individuals and for the families of those who have been arrested, and I believe the standing of the Foreign Office is undermined as a result. We are told that the Foreign Office does everything it can, but it needs to do most of that quietly and behind closed doors, and the difficulty is that it is hard for some families to see the difference between doing nothing and perhaps doing a great deal. That is the dilemma. When those families see detained people from other countries being released—whether those are Canadians, Americans, French or Germans—and the Brits are not, they do wonder whether it is because the Foreign Office is simply not doing its job properly. That is the issue.
The Minister will be assured that I do not want to spend all the time I have in this debate just moaning about the Foreign Office. I have some positive suggestions, which I hope will be taken seriously, because I believe that this is an issue on which we could do much better. There are some ideas that are currently circulating, and they are not all mine—I am stealing other peoples’ ideas and trying to put them together in order genuinely to try to help.
I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) on securing the debate, and on the tremendous amount of work that he has done in this area. It is also a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for South Islington and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry), the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, which I have been delighted to join as a new member in the last few weeks. I am pleased to be able to say that I thought she made an excellent contribution, and I agreed with every word of it. I also join her in recognising the amount of work that was done by the previous Committee in the last Parliament, under the chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Stamford (Alicia Kearns), who continues to chair the all-party parliamentary group on arbitrary detention and hostage affairs and to take a strong interest in the subject. The APPG produced an extremely good report, although I have to say that the Government response was a bit disappointing, so it is right for us to press these matters further today.
I myself chair the all-party parliamentary group on media freedom. Media freedom is also under huge pressure across the globe: far too many journalists have died in pursuit of their profession, or are currently in prison. According to the latest report, 546 journalists and media workers are detained as of today. The UK has rightly championed the cause of media freedom, especially in the Foreign Office, and we need to go on making that case. It is doubly concerning that some of the journalists who are in prison are British.
My right hon. Friend has mentioned a few specific cases, and I want to do the same. Both he and I were privileged to attend the Magnitsky awards dinner a couple of weeks ago. Bill Browder, now Sir William Browder, has done a huge amount, initially to support prisoners in Russia and to bring sanctions against those responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky, but he has widened his campaign to highlight cases of detained political prisoners around the world.
On that point, it is worth mentioning that Dr Ibadoghlu’s son visited Parliament a few weeks ago, when we had an opportunity to discuss his case. He has a close association with part of the University of London, and he was given assurances that it would be safe for him to return to visit his ailing mother. Subsequent to his arrest, a PhD student, whose name is Fazil Gasimov, was extradited from Turkey and tortured into giving evidence against Dr Ibadoghlu, and he has felt it necessary to go on hunger strike. There seems to be a huge effort by the Azeri Government to persecute people, even at the same time as a COP meeting was scheduled to take place in their capital.
I am extremely grateful to my right hon. Friend, who makes the point that I was just coming to. As the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee pointed out, all too often one part of Government may be pressing for somebody’s release while other parts of Government seem to have a normal relationship with the foreign Government responsible and do little. We managed to send many delegates to COP29—I cannot remember how many there were, but it was certainly in three figures—but I would be interested to know how many of them actually raised with the Government in Baku the case of Dr Ibadoghlu.
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Too often, families feel that they are fighting two battles: one against the foreign state that has detained their loved one, and another against the UK Government, who do not seem to prioritise the case. I am deeply sorry that that should be the case, and today’s debate is about, hopefully, sowing the seed of change.
The FCDO also lacks a consistent policy on the treatment of dual nationals, often citing states’ refusal to recognise dual nationality as a barrier to action. That is a practical challenge, not a legal one, and it should not stop UK officials from attempting to access prisons or courts. When the Government fail to act, it risks sending a damaging message to dual nationals that they are less British and, by extension, less deserving of protection.
For instance, that reasoning was used very much in the case of Jimmy Lai, who is a British citizen. China decided, because it does not recognise dual nationality, to call him a dual national. He has never been a dual national, and I have lost count of the number of times that I have literally shouted at Government Ministers in Westminster Hall that he is not a dual national. When they got up to speak, they just said that he is a dual national. He has never been a dual national. He is a proud British citizen. He got into Hong Kong long before he was of an age to have a nationality in that sense or a passport. He has been a British national non-stop since then.
Mohammed Ibrahim Al Shaibani became DIB chairman shortly before Mr Cornelius’s arrest. He appears to have orchestrated Mr Cornelius’s continued detention and the asset seizure. Mr Al Shaibani holds influential positions in Dubai’s Government, indicating an abuse of power. Mr Cornelius is now 70 and has suffered severe health issues in prison, including tuberculosis that went untreated for 18 months. Meanwhile, his seized property, originally claimed to be “worthless” by the bank, is now being redeveloped as a luxury project called The Acres, worth, strangely, $3 billion.
Under the last Government, I raised Mr Cornelius’s case finally with the former Prime Minister Lord Cameron while he was Foreign Secretary. Subsequently, he engaged personally in seeking clemency for Mr Cornelius. He met the family, raised the case with the UAE Foreign Minister and wrote personally to the ruler of Dubai. That was a first, because everybody else seemed to have shied away from this one, not wanting to upset the UAE, it appears.
To be fair to Lord Cameron, he got the issue and he started to tackle it, and that was important. The present Foreign Secretary, who replaced Lord Cameron in July, failed to raise Mr Cornelius’s case in his recent visit to the UAE in September, which perplexes me, given that it had already been raised. That just encourages a country like the UAE to carry on and to double down. I do not understand why.
In response to my written question to the Foreign Secretary, I received this answer:
“The Foreign Secretary raised the importance of consular issues, although not this specific case, during his visit to the UAE on 5 September and first meeting with Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed.”
I understand that on Sunday, the Prime Minister is expected to visit the UAE and, I think, Saudi Arabia. Will the Minister make it clear to the Prime Minister— I believe this is the view that will be expressed in this debate—that he must not only raise the case, which is important, but demand categorically that Ryan Cornelius is released into the hands of his family without delay? I hope that whatever is summarised from his meetings, that specific issue is there in black and white for this House to record.
The hon. Member for Macclesfield (Tim Roca) raised Mr Cornelius’s case several weeks ago in an Adjournment debate, when he was reassured by the Minister for Development, the right hon. Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds), that:
“the case will continue to be raised with the UAE authorities”,—[Official Report, 19 November 2024; Vol. 757, c. 241.]
and yet it was not. If Ministers give assurances in this House, Madam Deputy Speaker, do you not agree that they should actually back up those assurances? I wonder if the Minister present will explain why that was the case.
Although individual cases are raised with international counterparts, often no concrete action follows. I hope the Minister agrees that once a case is raised, it will be followed up. In Mr Cornelius’s case, I believe the path could culminate in sanctions, so there is a process. It is clear that raising the case with the UAE authorities has yet to produce a result. What we want is a real record that the authorities are now being warned that should they fail to take action, individual sanctions under the Magnitsky rules will follow.
Will the Minister therefore now look to imposing targeted Magnitsky sanctions on those responsible for Mr Cornelius’s arbitrary detention and asset seizures? There are a number of them: His Excellency Mohammed Al Shaibani, who was the chairman of the DIB; Yahya Saeed Ahmad Nasser Lootah, the vice chairman of the board of directors; Hamad Abdulla Rashed Obaid Al Shamsi, who was a board member; Ahmad Mohammad Saeed Bin Humaidan, a board member; Abdul Aziz Ahmed Rahma Mohamed Al Muhairi, a board member; Dr Hamad Buamim, a board member; Javier Marin Romano, a board member; Bader Saeed Abdulla Hareb Al Mheiri, a board member; and Dr Cigdem Kogar, a board member. All were involved in this case; all are eligible for Magnitsky sanctions. Mr Cornelius should now be released immediately, or sanctions, I believe, should follow.
I will deal reasonably quickly with the case of Jimmy Lai, and then I will give way to others in the debate. Jimmy Lai is a renowned pro-democracy campaigner, journalist and media owner. I wear the badge to free him with pride. This man has been treated abominably—he is a hero, and we should recognise that. He is 77 and a proud British citizen. He is also a Catholic, and has been denied the normal communion that he would expect as a believer in Catholicism; it has been shut off from him for a long time, which matters a great deal to him. He is a prisoner of conscience. He could have fled Hong Kong after the Sino-British agreement was trashed, but he chose to stay. Why? He wanted to set an example for the many who could not flee and who were going to be arrested—that he was not going to run away just because he had money. This is a brave man.
Mr Lai is currently on trial in Hong Kong for alleged offences against national security and alleged sedition, said to arise out of his work as a newspaper publisher and his pro-democracy activism. His case is emblematic of the crackdown on the media in Hong Kong, civil society and the rule of law. On 15 November 2024, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention published its opinion that Jimmy Lai is being unlawfully and arbitrarily detained and called for his immediate release. The working group found multiple violations of Mr Lai’s rights and freedoms, expressed alarm at his prolonged detention in solitary confinement and stressed that he should not be on trial at all.
This case, I say to the Minister, is very urgent. Mr Lai has been arbitrarily detained in prolonged solitary confinement for nearly four years, often in insufferable heat during the summer months. Securing Jimmy Lai’s release requires effective action across the Government to bring him home and reunite him with his family in London. At the moment, he is bravely giving evidence in his trial—at which, by the way, a number of Members present have been named. I have been apparently named. I am already sanctioned by the Chinese, but I have also been named as being party to the case being brought against him. I have to say publicly that I have, sadly, never met Jimmy Lai or corresponded with him. I wish that I had. I wish that I could tell him what a brave man he really is. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] Will the Minister outline today what urgent steps the Foreign Office is taking to secure Jimmy Lai’s release?
I remind the Minister and others that what we see in front of us now is a rise in hostage taking by nation states. The biggest abuser of this process is, of course, Iran. I worry about this abuse growing more and more in Iran. In January 2023—we must not forget about this—Iran executed British-Iranian national Alireza Akbari, who was arrested, charged and executed on spying charges, which he denied and which were totally untrue. It was the first execution of a dual national since the 1980s. Only four months later, the Iranian authorities executed a second dual national, Swedish-Iranian Habib Chaab. In October 2024, it executed a third dual national, German-Iranian Jamshid Sharmahd. At least one more dual national, Swedish-Iranian Ahmad Reza Djalia, has been sentenced to death since 2023.
I conclude on the simple basis, as I raised at the beginning, that we can no longer go along with the idea that we somehow lose influence if we raise these cases publicly. We can no longer go on with this idea that we can manage a generalist approach to this in the Foreign Office. As has already been raised, we need a much more professional, deliberate and permanent status in the Department to deal with this matter.
Finally, we have in our hands the Magnitsky sanctions legislation. With the case of Ryan Cornelius and others, it is high time that those who were party to the arrest and incarceration of innocent British citizens find themselves facing Magnitsky sanctions, unless they recant and that individual is released. That at least gives us a tool. I ask the Government to get to the Dispatch Box, when the time comes, and commit to that process.
The first of those ideas is that we have to put this in context. There are now many more Brits travelling all over the world and going to all sorts of places—the numbers are going up all the time—and that is to be encouraged. Of course, while more Brits are travelling around the world, we are also in a world where fewer and fewer countries pay much attention to anything that might be seen in any sense as any form of rule of law, so Brits get themselves into terrible trouble and some of them are arbitrarily detained. As I say, I am stealing other people’s ideas, so I want genuinely to compliment the previous members of the Foreign Affairs Committee. The problems of arbitrary detention and how to solve people being detained abroad are complex and cases that many people have worked on, so the work of the previous Select Committee, very ably chaired by the hon. Member for Rutland and Stamford (Alicia Kearns), needs to be mentioned in dispatches. I am proud to be the second female Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. I hope that my Committee can meet the standards set by the hon. Lady.
The previous Committee’s report on state hostage taking made recommendations which, had they been implemented by the previous Government, would have been very effective in cases that have been raised today. Chief among them were the recommendation to formalise and publish the criteria for determining whether the detention of a British national by a foreign state is considered arbitrary, and the recommendation to establish a senior position in the Foreign Office solely committed to arbitrary and complex detentions.
There are examples of criteria: the United Nations has criteria and the Americans have criteria. They are different criteria, but they are very interesting and I certainly hope there is someone in the Foreign Office at this moment looking at potential criteria and looking to draft some. I agree with the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green that it is about time we had established criteria, so there is a little more transparency on this issue.
It was very disappointing that a number of the previous Government’s Foreign Secretaries disregarded and kicked into the long grass the recommendations set out by the Committee. It does not have to be that way. I am encouraged that the Labour party has, since October last year, been committed to having a special envoy for UK citizens seized abroad. Last week, in front of my Committee, with Sebastien Lai and Sanaa Seif sitting behind him, my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary reconfirmed his commitment to that. I am encouraged to see that the Labour manifesto went further than the previous Foreign Affair Committee’s recommendations on consular access. Labour pledged to ensure the legal right to consular access and I certainly hope the Government will deliver on that, but we must act quickly because the likes of Alaa and Jimmy and their families cannot, and should not, have to wait any longer. I therefore call on the Government to be clearer in their timelines for implementing those promises.
Having thought about that, and having met families of a number of those detained, I think we should institute an office in the Foreign Office that is committed to arbitrary detention which establishes proper criteria for categorising someone as wrongfully detained. As soon as someone is arrested, the local consular office should inform the Foreign Office, which should apply the criteria to the case and make recommendations to the Foreign Secretary. It would then be up to the Foreign Secretary to decide whether that case would be given the benefit of the special envoy, who would then take leadership of the case. There will not be many of them, but those determined as victims of arbitrary detention will be very special cases, and will have the sorts of resources and focus that they need and deserve. It will be the job of the envoy to get their prisoner out, first and foremost, using all the levers of the state. They should be given permission to think laterally and be creative, and to think of every way we can ensure we get our British citizens out. It will also be their job to keep in close, active and respectful contact with the families, so that they know what is going on.
I know that a number of people have concerns. I have heard the counter-arguments and I understand them, but if we look at what the Americans are doing, many of those concerns may be allayed. Let us look at what is going on at the moment in the United States. I am grateful to the officials from the United States Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs who spoke with me at some length yesterday. I found the conversation I had with them as enlightening as I did inspiring. I want to go into that in some depth, because I want to enlighten and inspire Members who are listening to the debate today, so that they will agree with me and continue to put pressure on the Foreign Office to get on with things.
The office is based in the US State Department. It deals with about 35 to 45 wrongful detention cases a year, as well as the more black-and-white cases of US citizens taken hostage by the likes of ISIS. The office is responsible, in collaboration with other Departments, for making recommendations, on the basis of 11 criteria, on whether an individual’s detention is arbitrary. The recommendation is made to the Secretary of State, who remains responsible for signing off each individual case. It is a civil servant-led unit that applies the criteria, but with ministerial oversight.
The team is about 30 people. There are experts in negotiation, experts on a specific region and experts in supporting families. Within those teams are people whose sole role is family engagement, including trained psychologists. In much the same way as the police in this country, where victims of crime will have a dedicated family liaison officer in really serious cases, one main function of the office is to support the family. In our discussions yesterday, they told me that within hours of a US citizen being categorised as wrongfully detained, the special envoy calls the family of the individual to introduce themselves and explain the next steps. The envoy or his staff then remain the direct contact with family members, providing them with regular updates and answering questions they may have, including answering the phone at eleven o’clock at night to calm down a parent who fears they will never see their child again.
We need to do things better. The Foreign Office’s communication with families is not good. In my belief, it is clearly inadequate. As Laila Soueif told the media, she thought she was being ignored by the Foreign Secretary since he had taken up the post. I should make it clear that I am glad that he has since had time to see the family, but the message cannot be sent out that the Foreign Secretary is simply too busy to meet detainees’ families. It makes those families feel ignored and feel that the Government do not really care. The reason that families want to see the Foreign Secretary is that that is the best way for them to get reassurance that the Foreign Office is paying attention. They should not need to see the Foreign Secretary if they are being looked after properly by a specially dedicated team whose only job, other than ensuring that the family is reassured and kept in the loop on what is going on, is to get their loved one out.
I know the Foreign Office remains committed to the release of all arbitrarily detained individuals, but even the perception that they are not doing all they can to get someone released is not only incredibly distressing to a family who have already suffered such unimaginable pain, but damages the credibility of the diplomatic service, the Foreign Office and the Government as a whole. None of us should want that. Quite simply, we should not look like we are incompetent, incapable or uncaring.
I was also told that the moment a Secretary of State declares a case to be one of arbitrary detention, the SPEHA team kicks the whole Government system in motion to work on the case. They work across Government Departments, as well as with Congress, external organisations, private industry and the media, immediately gathering a strong team effort to begin putting sustained pressure on to the country holding their citizen.
A key point that struck me from my conversation with them is that without an office solely focused on these cases, the team simply does not come together. In my discussions with British detainees and campaign groups, I have heard one major concern for years, which is the UK Government’s lack of cohesion on these cases. Let me give a recent example. Why did the Department for Business and Trade organise an industry delegation to Cairo in June 2024, and UK Export Finance help host an Egypt-UK investment opportunity forum in London in September, all while the Egyptian Government had one of our citizens, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, wrongfully held in prison without consular access? Who thought that through? Did anybody think that through? Or was it one of those things that, because there is not a focus, just happened? I suspect that it is the latter and that is why we have to change.
I am fully committed to this Government’s rigorous focus on growing the economy, and I support the building of a prosperous UK-Egypt trade partnership. It is so important that we get investment into this country. But I wonder what mixed signals we are sending. What leverage do we have when one Department is criticising a Government for detaining our citizen, while another Department is also trying to encourage British businesses to invest and form partnerships in that country? What message is that sending to a detainee’s family?
When I raised this question with the Americans, and asked them, “Do you not step on the toes of ambassadors? How do you not send out mixed messages?”, they were keen to stress that it actually made life easier for the ambassadors, because they were there as the hard cops. They were there as almost a self-contained unit. Their job was to get people out, and that is what they did: they pulled the levers together in order to ensure that they did. They described ambassadors as their secret weapon, experts on the country who knew the key players and, most important, knew what ideas would work. They said that they were there to remove the “boulder” when ambassadors have to deal with cases of this kind, because it takes up so much bandwidth that the poor ambassadors cannot deal with other issues. Obviously they will still give advice, but there is that special team to deal with arbitrarily detained people so that the ambassadors can get on with our financial relationship with Europe. I believe that if we had a similar unit in the Foreign Office, the Foreign Office would be more effective, and it would be of great assistance to the Foreign Secretary, who cannot give his full attention to these uniquely complex cases. It would also give the families a senior point of contact on which they could rely.
The American unit has the power to impose specific sanctions, through the Levinson Act, that target those who are responsible for, or complicit in, the unlawful or wrongful detention of US nationals. We should be making better use of our sanctions policy to deter the wrongful detention of British people, or as a tool to apply pressure to those who hold British nationals. I have even heard stories of jailers being sanctioned. This can be done by those who are sufficiently ambitious, can think laterally and have the necessary focus. If we had better parliamentary scrutiny of our sanctions policy, perhaps we would make better use of it, but that is a debate for another day. Perhaps we simply do not know how the Government decide what cases warrant sanctions.
However, the whole-government approach, using the embassies in the country, the regional experts in the State Department and the negotiation experts in SPEHA, strikes me as absolutely the right approach. I think it is a lesson that we should learn from the Americans, and I hope that the Foreign Office takes this recommendation seriously, because it is about time we changed things. We cannot go on like this. I do not want to see anyone else outside the Foreign Office starving themselves in the hope that, somehow or other, that will help their son or daughter to come back to this country, so I say, “Please focus on this, and please sort it out.”
In respect of the first case I shall mention, I am able to congratulate the Government on the part that they played. At the dinner, it was a privilege to meet Vladimir Kara-Murza. I have raised his case in the House, and many other people have done so over the last few years. We were seriously worried, particularly after the death of Alexei Navalny, that Kara-Murza would be next. There was certainly evidence to suggest that he would have died had he remained in prison, and I know that the British Government, along with the American Government and others, did a great deal to obtain his release through a prisoner swap that took place a few months ago. I have some concerns about the concept of prisoner swaps, because there is always the risk that carrying out a swap to obtain the release of innocent people in return for sending back people who are certainly not innocent—which is what happened in this instance—simply encourages the detention of other innocents in the future. In Kara-Murza’s case, however, I think that had he not been released he would have died. The release at the same time of Evan Gershkovich, an American journalist, was clearly another strong priority.
It is welcome that here is a case in which we have actually obtained the release of a British national, but sadly a number of others are still in prison. My right hon. Friend mentioned several of them, but I will start, as he did, with the case of Jimmy Lai, a remarkably brave man who is now detained under the draconian national security law that has been introduced in Hong Kong. It is noticeable that, just two decades ago, Hong Kong was 18th in the world rankings for press freedom; it is now 135th. Jimmy Lai was a publisher who worked to uphold freedom of speech; he was imprisoned as a result, and his health is now under severe pressure after four years in solitary confinement. I have met his son Sebastien, as has the Foreign Secretary, and we will continue to raise his case here until he is released.
There has also been reference to Alaa Abd el-Fattah. Like a number of other Members, I was able to speak to his mother, Laila Soueif, very recently. She is on a hunger strike to obtain his release. He has been convicted of spreading false news, and has been a long-standing target of the regime. It is notable that, in opposition, the Foreign Secretary was very vocal in condemning the Egyptian Government in respect of his case, and actually called on the Government to deny the Egyptian ambassador access to Whitehall until he was released. I have not observed the Egyptian ambassador being denied access, and Alaa Abd el-Fattah is still in prison. I therefore ask the Foreign Secretary to reflect on what he said in opposition, and to strengthen the progress that we are making.
The third case that I want to mention is that of a British journalist who is not in prison. Clare Rewcastle Brown, an independent journalist, has been the target of abusive lawsuits in Malaysia since she exposed corruption there. This year she was sentenced, in absentia, to two years in prison on a bogus defamation charge, having not even been told that she had been put on trial. Obviously she is anxious to appeal, but she has been told that if she is to appeal, she must attend the court in Malaysia in person. Very understandably, she is extremely reluctant to do so, given the amount of personal risk. The Government, as far as I am aware, have not commented on her case, and she has struggled to obtain support from the Foreign Office, so I ask the Minister specifically to look into her case as well.
There is also the case of Gubad Ibadoghlu, an Azeri activist but one who was a senior adviser at the London School of Economics. He returned to visit his family in Azerbaijan in 2023, and was promptly arrested and locked up. His family were quite badly assaulted during his arrest, and my right hon. Friend and I, and any others who were at that dinner a couple of weeks ago, will have heard his daughter speaking about that and about her fears for his health. He, too, is seriously ill and needs assistance.