[ad_1]
Gurpreet Singh Johal: ‘Five foreign secretaries and four prime ministers have failed to call for my brother’s release’
In March, after six years in captivity in Iran, the British-Iranian dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe flew home to be reunited with her family. The photographs of her hugging her husband, Richard, and their daughter, Gabriella, moved me to tears. I have long shared their anger at the UK government’s failure to protect its citizens imprisoned overseas. But, in that moment, I was able to share their joy, too.
My brother Jagtar Singh Johal, a British citizen, has been arbitrarily detained in India for five years. The prosecution’s paper-thin case against him is based on a forced confession he signed after police tortured him with electricity and threatened to burn him alive.
In those five years, five foreign secretaries and four prime ministers have failed to call for Jagtar’s release. Sadly, as the cases of Nazanin, Alaa Abd el-Fattah and many others show, this is a systemic issue. The UK government is set up to fail British citizens detained abroad. It is a system geared to inertia: from the outside, countless small cogs appear to be turning but the machine never moves.
This has created a community of families who are all bashing their heads against the same wall. I remember singing carols outside Downing Street one December with Richard and Gabriella. This November, on the fifth anniversary of Jagtar’s arrest, Richard and Nazanin also joined the demonstration in Westminster calling for him to be freed.
My brother had travelled to India for his wedding, in October 2017. Three weeks later, he was out shopping with his wife when unmarked cars pulled up, and plainclothes police officers bundled him into a van. My last clear memories of him are from the wedding reception: laughing and dancing and totally in love.
Jagtar was held incommunicado for 10 days, but as soon as he was able to meet a representative of the British high commission, he told them he had been tortured. He sent a note via his lawyer, detailing the horrific abuse. From the start, the UK government has known about his forced confession and the trumped-up nature of the charges he faces. Earlier this year, it was also revealed that UK intelligence services may have contributed to Jagtar’s arrest and subsequent torture by sending a tipoff to their Indian counterparts.
Each new foreign secretary and prime minister has promised to “raise Jagtar’s case”, then failed to take decisive action. In May, Boris Johnson accepted a decision by a panel of UN experts that Jagtar had been arbitrarily detained, but did not follow through on their recommendation that he should be released immediately.
The consular staff we deal with are kind and helpful. They visit Jagtar in prison because we cannot, and I believe they also want to end his ordeal. But as Richard Ratcliffe says: “Their job is to be a buffer. Their role is to absorb all the frustration, anger and pain.”
The UK government could bring Jagtar home if it wanted to. Just as it could have brought Nazanin home long before it finally did. But there is a deep, institutional resistance to doing anything that risks offending our international partners, even when a young Briton’s life is at stake.
Another scene that sticks in my mind from earlier this year is from Cop27 in Egypt. The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, speedwalked away from uncomfortable questions about Alaa Abd el-Fattah, who was imprisoned last year for sharing a Facebook post. Alaa was refusing food and water at the time, and at real risk of dying. Still, the UK government refused to act.
This year when holiday visitors call at the Ratcliffe home, Richard, Nazanin and Gabriella can greet them together. If any come to our house in Dumbarton, Jagtar will still be missing. He has now spent his sixth Christmas in a Delhi jail, detained without trial, and the UK government is to blame.
Sanaa Seif: ‘There are only so many times we can hear from government officials before we start to doubt their words’
My brother, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, has now spent another Christmas in prison in Egypt. His 10th of his son’s 11 years of life. His second as a British citizen. He has now spent a quarter of his life behind bars. This was the year that we were hoping we would get a breakthrough. Even after 10 years, one can’t help but imagine there’s a happy ending around the corner if we work hard enough.
Alaa is being punished for his writings about democracy, and his ideas about labour and technology. The world outside keeps turning and changing, and he sits frozen in prison. I know what prison in Egypt feels like. I had three years of my 20s taken from me for small acts, for criticising the government’s abysmal human rights record. I was unvaccinated and in a horribly overcrowded cell for much of the period that Covid-19 was raging. But small things gave me hope when I was locked away: the British embassy had no trouble visiting me in prison, and I believed that I would ultimately be released.
That is not the case for my brother. For more than a year now the British embassy has been prevented from visiting him in prison. And there is no guarantee he will be released when his current five-year sentence is served – he has already served two years in pre-trial detention on a separate case that has yet to go to trial.
When he last completed a sentence of five years, in 2019, he was rearrested after only six months. So, patience is impossible, because Alaa is – in effect – serving a life sentence as long as the government sees him as a threat.
The British government says my brother’s freedom is a priority. It is almost two months since Rishi Sunak met Egypt’s president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, at Cop27, and pledged to resolve Alaa’s case. That same week, Alaa collapsed and almost died in his prison cell after several days of water strike and more than 200 days on hunger strike. And yet we have seen no progress in his case since then.
There are only so many times we can hear from UK government officials that they are committed to securing Alaa’s release before we start to doubt their words. The UK government has a close relationship with Egypt. If the British embassy was able to get access to me, I don’t understand why it cannot for my brother.
The foreign secretary, James Cleverly, recently wrote: “Backing words with action is exactly the kind of diplomacy that I want to lead.” But when asked about Alaa’s case, he says only that the UK government is speaking to the Egyptians. There need to be more diplomatic consequences for the denial of the rights of a British national. The Egyptian ambassador retains normal access to Whitehall, while the British ambassador in Cairo is blocked from performing his duties and seeing my brother.
We have seen before that when the UK government decides to act in similar cases, things can change very quickly. We are hoping that a new year will mean a new approach from Sunak and Cleverly, and that Alaa will be freed in 2023. That when we gather together in Brighton for his son’s birthday next year, or for Christmas at my sister’s flat in London, he will be back where he belongs, at the centre of our lives again: 2023 must be the year he hugs his son again, and my mum and the rest of our family.
[ad_2]
