I remind hon. Members that there have been some changes to normal practice to support the new hybrid arrangements. Timings of debates have been amended to allow technical arrangements to be made for the debates. There will also be suspensions between debates. Members participating either physically or virtually must arrive at the start of debates in Westminster Hall. Members are expected to remain for the entire debate.
I must also remind Members participating virtually that they must leave their cameras on for the duration of the debate and that they will be visible at all times, both to each other and to those of us in the Boothroyd Room. If Members attending virtually have any technical problems, they should email the Westminster Hall Clerks’ email address, which is: westminsterhallclerks@ parliament.uk. Members attending physically should clean their spaces before they use them and as they leave the room. I also remind Members that Mr Speaker has stated that masks should be worn in Westminster Hall.
There will be a time limit in this debate, which I will advise after the Member in charge has finished speaking, but I warn Members now that it is likely to be between two and three minutes.
That this House has considered the detention of Jagtar Singh Johal.
It is good to see you, Mr Hollobone, in the Chair and to see that so many Members have been able to join us, either physically or virtually. Members joining the debate today, either here in the Boothroyd Room or online, will be glad to hear first that I intend to keep my contribution relatively short today. I only really have one question to ask the Minister, and I think that Jagtar’s case will be best served by allowing other diverse voices from across these islands to speak on his behalf and to demonstrate to the UK Government that there will be no let-up until Jagtar is released.
Let us get to my question for the Minister, which I will ask again when I sum up: why have the UK Government deemed that Jagtar Singh Johal’s detention is not an arbitrary one? Of course, many other questions today will flow from this one and I am sure that we will hear it being asked in other guises over the next hour. but the Crown’s Minister must answer it.
I have raised the case of Jagtar Singh Johal with Ministers almost 20 times since my first point of order about it on 15 November 2017. The week after that, I first raised it at Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office questions, when the allegation of torture was still fresh. The House of Commons was told by the then Minister of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, who was responsible for consular policy, that
“We will work very closely to investigate the matter and will, of course, take extreme action if a British citizen is being tortured.”—[Official Report, 21 November 2017; Vol. 631, c. 858.]
That Minister is no longer in the Government—indeed, he is no longer even a member of the Conservative party. Nevertheless, when a Minister speaks from the Dispatch Box, we should be assured that their words will be believed. I still remember my own surprise that day at hearing the use of the words “extreme action”, but both the Singh Johal family and I would be content right now with a simple ruling of arbitrary detention and for the concomitant obligations to kick in.
The debate will last until 5.50. I am obliged to call the Front Benchers no later than 5.27, and the guideline limits are five minutes for the Scottish National party, five minutes for Her Majesty’s Opposition, and 10 minutes for the Minister, after which the Member in charge will have three minutes to sum up the debate at the end. There are nine Back-Bench contributors. If there are no interventions during Back-Bench speeches, we can have a three-minute time limit.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone.
While in India for his wedding on 4 November 2017, British citizen Jagtar Singh Johal was shopping with his newly wedded wife when he was bound, hooded and bundled into a car by plain-clothed police officers. Leaving his wife with no explanation why he had been taken, Jagtar was taken into police custody and denied his right to see a lawyer, family members or a representative from the British high commission. Once imprisoned, Jagtar reported being tortured by police. He said crocodile clips were placed on him, with electricity fired through his body. Such was the severity of the torture that Jagtar had to be carried out of the interrogation room. To make the pain stop, Jagtar reports that he was forced to confess to the alleged conspiracies.
Why has he faced these basic violations of his rights? Prior to his arrest, Jagtar was involved in raising awareness of human rights abuses against India’s Sikh population. Human rights organisation Reprieve fears that he has been targeted for exercising freedom of expression and his right to it. It has already cost him four years in prison without trial. He has endured torture and now there is a real risk that confessions extracted through torture could be used to sentence him to the death penalty. Jagtar now languishes in prison, where mass covid-19 outbreaks have triggered calls for states to protect vulnerable prisoners.
In the face of these human rights abuses, what have the British Government done? Rather than standing up for the rights of British nationals overseas, they have failed to follow Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office policy to lobby for arbitrarily detained UK nationals overseas, and ignored calls from myself and 139 colleagues earlier this year to do precisely that. The Government have even failed to secure an independent medical assessment of Jagtar to judge the severity and extent of torture, and to secure private consular visits with him for over three years. The Foreign Secretary has failed to meet with Jagtar’s family and despite calls from human rights organisations to raise the issue, the Prime Minister failed to challenge Indian Prime Minister Modi on Jagtar’s detention and treatment in a meeting in April.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Hollobone. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes) for securing this important debate and for his tireless efforts.
Many residents in my constituency are deeply concerned about Jagtar’s continued detention. As vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on British Sikhs, I know the ongoing work that that group has done. In a previous Parliament, I spent an extraordinary amount of time lobbying for the release of my constituent Billy Irving, wrongly detained for years in an Indian jail. I know the horrendous impact of that ordeal on his family and can imagine that the impact on Jagtar Singh Johal’s family is similarly huge.
Let us remember that Jagtar was taken from the street where he was walking with his new wife, who was not even given an explanation for her husband’s detention. They had just got married and were looking forward to their future home in Scotland. Even more concerning now is the analysis by his legal counsel in India confirming that he faces a possible death sentence on at least three of the charges levelled against him. Forced confession, allegedly extracted through torture, is the primary evidence on which these death penalty charges are based, so his fair trial rights have been gravely violated and detention is clearly arbitrary. Despite the fact that the UK Government’s policy is to lobby for the release of arbitrarily detained British nationals overseas, the Foreign Secretary has not yet done so in Jagtar’s case. I would like to hear from the Minister why the UK Government have failed to implement their own policy on arbitrarily detained British citizens.
Of course, we are looking at all this through a particular prism, because covid puts an urgent complexion on everything. I can only imagine the anxiety that Jagtar and his family face knowing that he is so far from them—with covid rife and them unable to do a thing to keep him safe. He is in a horrifically overcrowded prison. Even though the state government has recognised the challenges that covid is causing and recently sanctioned the emergency release of thousands of prisoners—even those accused of murder—Jagtar was not included and remains incarcerated.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I commend the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes) on securing the debate and on his advocacy on behalf of his constituent. There is a great deal that I could say about this case, but time is short. I will limit myself to three brief points.
First, I understand the concerns that the Minister will have with regard to the apparent interference in the criminal justice system of another sovereign state. That is well rehearsed; it is not new territory for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. However, I bring to his attention the quite remarkable and wholly inappropriate briefing note circulated to Members of this House today; it was brought to the Deputy Speaker’s attention by the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire. I gently suggest to the Minister that it demonstrates, in the way in which it is constructed—both in terms of its highly misleading and inaccurate content and how it strays into discussion of the procedure and indeed substance of the case against Jagtar Singh Johal—that in fact the Indian Government themselves do not have great regard for the propriety of the independence of their own criminal justice system. I hope that the Minister will bear that in mind when he formulates his own position with regard to it.
Secondly, the absolutely most crucial point, made by the hon. Member, is that Jagtar Singh Johal has been the subject of very strong prima facie arbitrary detention. As has been made clear by counsel instructed by Reprieve and Redress in the briefing they provided for Members today, this is caught by categories 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the guidance produced by the United Nations working group on arbitrary detention. I was in legal practice myself for long enough to know that lawyers can come to different conclusions, so if the advice given or the conclusions drawn by the Minister and his staff are different, I hope he will explain exactly where these differences come from.
It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone.
For Jagtar Singh Johal, it is hard not to feel angry, defeated and despondent. I cannot imagine how difficult it has been for his family—and his wife in particular, who has not heard from her beloved husband since he was snatched and detained by plain-clothes officers in India just three weeks after their wedding in October 2017.
As we know, Jagtar is a British citizen, a loving family man and valued citizen of Dumbarton, but the UK Government—the Government of the country of Mr Johal’s birth—have fallen silent and deserted him. Why have the Government not demanded the release of their own British citizen? Our Foreign Secretary has not so much as met Mr Johal’s grief-stricken family, despite his predecessor accepting that Mr Johal had no chance of a fair trial and was in grave danger. However, in their attempts to strike new trade deals the Government seem to have damaged our global moral standing and neglected our humanitarian responsibilities. It is dangerous brinkmanship of the highest order, but it is also what we have come to expect. It seems the UK Government would sooner allow Mr Johal’s death than jeopardise any future trade deal. As recently as April this year, the Prime Minister met the Indian Prime Minister remotely and once again neglected to raise Mr Johal’s case during the meeting.
It is time for the Government to act to secure Mr Johal’s release. They must work towards a medical assessment of Mr Johal and of the facility in which he is imprisoned, and they must push for a private consultant to visit and gain access to where Mr Johal is confined. At the earliest opportunity, Ministers should meet Mr Johal’s family. The Government’s silence is a moral outrage and an unforgivable dereliction of their duty to protect a British citizen.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I am grateful to the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes) for securing this vital debate. We have spoken privately about this issue in the past, and I wholeheartedly agree that its importance cannot be overstated.
That a British citizen can be arrested and held for so long in another country with no indication of when his case will finally be resolved by due process should shame our lazy and hands-off Foreign Secretary. What is more, the Home Office attempted to add to the family’s burden by trying to expel Gurpreet Kaur, Jagtar Singh Johal’s wife, which shows the contempt with which this Government are prepared to treat those in peril.
Many of my Coventry constituents will be deeply concerned about this matter because two of our neighbours face a similar prospect this year. Two brothers resident in my constituency were hauled into custody after raids on their homes last year. That has traumatised their families and sent shockwaves through our local community in Coventry. As British citizens who have lived in our country their whole lives, they deserve from the Government the same protection that we all receive, but they are now languishing in custody ahead of extradition later this year, and they are profoundly worried about what the future holds for them.
Ministers have offered the stock assurances that the brothers will be properly treated by the Indian authorities and that they will not face the death penalty, but none of what they or their families have been put through can be said to have inspired confidence in promises made by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office or the Home Office. Given that the two men in question have been investigated previously and the Home Office decided that there was no further case to answer, it is not surprising that so many in the community are asking why the arrests took place. Those doubts have been reinforced in the minds of many by the simple fact that in the week before the arrests were made, the Foreign Secretary visited India and met Ajit Doval, a key national security adviser. What is the Foreign Secretary sacrificing in his haste to wrap up a trade deal with the current Indian Government?
5:14 pm
Claudia Webbe (Leicester East) (Ind) [V]
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes) on securing this hugely important debate.
Jagtar Singh Johal, a British citizen and a Sikh human rights advocate from Dunbartonshire, sought to use his platform to raise awareness of historical abuses carried out against the Sikh population. In 2017, he travelled to India to get married, and three weeks after the ceremony plain-clothes police officers abducted him on the street. According to the human rights organisation Reprieve, the police brutally tortured Jagtar with electricity and brought petrol into his cell, threatening to burn him alive. To make the pain stop, he signed blank pieces of paper and recorded video statements confessing to the charges against him, some of which carried the death penalty.
Jagtar’s imprisonment clearly amounts to arbitrary detention under international law. He has now been detained for more than three years without trial. When a British national is arbitrarily detained and tortured and faces a potential death sentence, all on the basis of trumped-up political charges, the British Government must make it clear that that is unacceptable. Despite it being Government policy to lobby for the release of arbitrarily detained UK nationals overseas, the Foreign Secretary has yet to do so for Jagtar.
Will the Minister explain why the Government failed to implement its policy to seek the release of arbitrarily detained British citizens in Jagtar’s case? This is even more urgent after a mass outbreak of covid-19 in the prison in which Jagtar is detained. The World Health Organisation and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights have called on states to protect vulnerable prisoners during the pandemic, to immediately release those who have been arbitrarily detained and to secure non-custodial alternatives to detention.
In April, I wrote to the Prime Minister urging him to raise Jagtar’s case during a meeting with his counterpart, the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Will the Minister confirm whether the Government raised Jagtar’s arbitrary detention with the Indian authorities, either at that meeting or at any other time?
Although the UK Government are anxious to improve relations with India so they can secure a post-Brexit trade deal, the UK-India relationship, and indeed all our diplomatic efforts, must be deeper than just trade. They should be based on the promotion of democracy, human rights and upholding international law. The Government must do all they can to ensure Jagtar’s safety and release.
5:17 pm
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I have spoken at length about many aspects of this case on many occasions, most notably in an Adjournment debate on the first anniversary of Jagtar’s detention on 27 November 2018. I do not intend to go over too much of that material again, but it is worth remembering how this case began.
Jagtar was a young man from Dumbarton, fresh from his wedding that week, who was enjoying his time with his new bride in Jalandhar, until suddenly a group of unidentifiable men in plain clothes leapt from a van, hit him and took him away. I am sure that we can all appreciate the terror and helplessness that his wife must have experienced in that moment—it would be unimaginable. The next few days, as Jagtar was held incommunicado, must have seemed like an eternity. Allegations of torture—and more recently, the reality of covid in an overcrowded maximum security prison half a world away—have weighed heavily on the family. I must say that their resilience in the face of this ordeal has been extraordinary.
By my reckoning, Jagtar has now been detained for 1,335 days without any substantial charges being brought in the case—that is coming up to four years. We know that the FCDO had been looking at a designation of arbitrary detention and, from conversations with Ministers of all levels, we know that they have been thinking about this for some time. This issue must surely have grown more recently. In January, we were glad of the estimation made by the charity Redress that Jagtar’s detention was an arbitrary one, and even more so when a cross-party group of 140 MPs signed a letter to the Foreign Secretary asking him to ensure that the FCDO intervenes to secure Jagtar’s release, as he himself is on record restating the policy quite recently.
Given that it is the opinion of Reprieve and Redress and their legal counsel that Jagtar’s detention is a clear breach of categories 1 to 4 of the United Nations working group on arbitrary detention’s definition, I again ask the Minister why the UK Government do not share that view. I expect the Minister to speak about many of the things that the UK Government have been doing for Jagtar, so please let me put on the record—I also do so on behalf of the family—that the work of the FCDO staff, both in post and in the prisoner policy and human rights team of the consular directorate here in London, has been immense. There has been immense support for the family and myself. They have diligently undertaken all that has been asked of them—and gone above and beyond on occasion, as I am sure they will know. I am only sorry that convention does not allow me to thank them by name.
However, these are civil servants who pursue their work through a framework established by their political masters. It would be remiss of me not to mention some of the issues that FCDO Ministers have either allowed to pass by or should immediately seek to remedy, beginning with the failure to ensure that an independent medical examination was undertaken to establish the facts around the allegations of torture made by Jagtar against the Punjabi police. There is the continuing lack of private consular visits, and the continuing reluctance of the Secretary of State specifically to meet with Jagtar’s family and myself, as his predecessor did. Finally, there is the decision of the Prime Minister not to raise Jagtar’s case with Prime Minister Modi when they last spoke virtually in April.
Taken together, these issues tell me that we have a group of FCDO civil servants who are ready and able to implement Government policy, but senior Ministers who are reluctant to escalate representations beyond simply raising them with the Indian Government officials. If they can do so with Governments of other countries where UK nationals are arbitrarily detained, why can they not do so with the Republic of India? Doing so would not be intervening in the internal affairs of the Republic of India unnecessarily. I have been clear from the start of this case that all we ask for is transparent due process and rule of law. When at least two of these elements are missing, as was so clearly demonstrated at Jagtar’s 161st pre-trial hearing today, it is my responsibility as his local MP to ask why. Neither the Singh Johal family nor I are asking for the “extreme action” that, as I mentioned, we were promised by the UK Government at the start of this process: we are asking them only to recognise an obvious fact.
This week, Jagtar was able to speak by video call with his brother for the first time since his incarceration. He was as good as could be expected under the circumstances, but most of all he wondered when he would get to see his family again in the flesh. That was a sobering moment for me. Jagtar Singh Johal is a husband, a son, a grandson, a brother, an uncle, and a son of the Rock of Dumbarton. He is arbitrarily detained in India. Why can the United Kingdom Government not recognise that? Let us get Jaggi released: let us bring him back to Scotland and let him see his family.
This is a shameful dereliction of duty, Mr Hollobone: a pattern of what is happening in India and how the British Government are failing to stand up for human rights. In recent years in India, there have been a growing number of arrests of humans rights defenders, student leaders, trade unionists, journalists, and others critical of the ruling Government. In occupied Kashmir in 2019, the Indian Government unilaterally revoked articles 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution.
I applaud all the efforts of the family and of the all-party parliamentary group on British Sikhs, and I applaud the sterling work of Sikhs in Scotland and, of course, my hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire and others who have been working on this issue. So much effort has been expended, but what we really need is action in India. For that to happen, we urgently need this UK Government to take these issues on board, to listen and to act. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.
Thirdly, Jagtar’s position is undoubtedly grim, but he is actually in a much better position than just about everybody I have ever campaigned for and worked with when they were facing the death penalty, because he has not yet been through the judicial process. I have looked at just about every death penalty case I have ever been part of and thought, “Dear God, if only we had got to this at first instance.” We are well ahead of that point at the moment. The Government should be implementing their own policy with regard to arbitrary detention. They have rightly done it for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and others often enough. Why are they not doing it for Jagtar?
If the Government will not stand up for British citizens abroad, how can any of us be safe? Those constituents of mine, and all who are in the same position, deserve fair treatment and a Government here at home who are willing to fight for them to secure due process. Instead, they are left in fear for their lives because this Government prefer to purchase new friendships abroad, setting at naught inalienable in their attempts to revive our faltering trade relationships. It is time for the Government to offer some leadership on this issue, instead of importing sectarian politics from abroad into our debate here in the UK. Minister must assure for all our citizens, regardless of their background, the fundamental right that defines being British.