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Family members of British nationals who are currently or have previously been detained abroad are calling on ministers to develop a ‘clear and consistent’ strategy that supports British nationals who are unfairly detained abroad.
A new campaign from Amnesty International outlines the “many failings” from successive UK governments in securing the release of arbitrarily detained prisoners.
Hong Kong journalist Jimmy Lai waited three years for the UK Government to publicly call for his release while being kept in solitary confinement with no access to light (he remains imprisoned by the Chinese state).
British-Iranian labour activist Mehran Raoof had to wait for four and a half years whilst suffering health problems in jail.
And Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe saw then-PM Boris Johnson incorrectly claim she was teaching journalism at the time of her arrest, which her family say jeopardised efforts to secure her release from Iran.
Meanwhile, Laila Soueif went on hunger strike for 149 days before being hospitalised to raise awareness of her son’s plight. She remains on an extremely calorie-restricted diet in hospital in protest over her British-Egyptian son Alaa Abdel-Fattah’s continued imprisonment in Egypt.
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Now a new campaign video from Amnesty features these figures or their family members and friends, including Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Leila Soueif (Alaa’s mother), Sebastien Lai (Jimmy Lai’s son) and others, all calling for a proper strategy and process for handling unfair detentions of Brits overseas.
Labour’s 2024 manifesto saw the party commit to better support for British nationals abroad and especially those whose human rights are being violated, which Amnesty says was “important and welcome.”
However, the campaign group says the problem of British nationals being detained arbitrarily is significant and appears to be growing. “It is important that the government urgently develops a clear strategy for how it will support those caught in this terrible predicament,” Deshmukh adds.
Backing the campaign, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe said: “I was never visited by any of the UK government or embassy staff, and it took eighteen months for them to even call for my release.
“The turmoil that my child has gone through is one of the things that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive. What I would like to say to the UK Government is, when a person is arrested, that person’s life matters.”
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Richard Ratcliffe: Families Face ‘Suppression and Isolation’
Richard Ratcliffe, husband of Nazanin, who campaigned for her release from Iran, tells Byline Times in an interview: “The first thing they need to do is to recognise the problem. At the moment, the Government doesn’t acknowledge anyone detained overseas as being arbitrarily detained or hostage.”
The US has a mechanism whereby they’ll check and decide if someone is unfairly detained, and they call them “wrongfully detained”.
Ratcliffe says: “There’s a door you can knock on to say, ‘Listen, I’m unfairly imprisoned, and I want my Government’s help’ The UK doesn’t do that.”
Successive Conservative Governments buried the problem, he adds. Evidence that then-Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond gave to the Parliament inquiry on Nazanin’s case showed the Government to be “quite proudly agnostic” on unfair detentions abroad, Ratcliffe says, with Hammond suggesting it was not the Government’s business to know whether someone should be imprisoned.
Ratcliffe believes UK Governments want to keep unfair detentions abroad under wraps, to handle them behind the scenes or hope the problems go away.
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“I can’t think of another area of injustice where your policy would be to suppress the injustice. You wouldn’t dare try this approach with sexual assault: ‘No, just keep quiet. That’s the best.’ But it seems okay for torture and hostage-taking…It exposes people to more danger.”
His call for a clear process to kick in when Brits are unfairly detained abroad would avoid what happened to Nazanin, Radcliffe believes. “We had five foreign secretaries on our watch with Nazanin, and there was a reset every time the Foreign Secretary changed. Whatever promises had been made, if they hadn’t been in writing, they hadn’t been made, and we had to rebuild the understanding again each time.”
The family’s highly-publicised campaign was successful, with Iran releasing Nazanin and fellow British-Iranian prisoner Anoosheh Ashoori in March 2022, after a long-standing debt had been paid by the Government to Iran.
“The reality is, we had a level of profile and access, which meant we got to keep knocking on the same doors and breaking them down…
“There are p