Detained British Nationals Abroad

Blair McDougall Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Blair McDougall (East Renfrewshire) (Lab)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) on securing this debate, and on continuing to be a discomfort in the derrière for successive Governments on these issues.

The right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) talked about the brightest and the best going into the Foreign Office, so I will begin by recognising the unfairness of this debate. We will all stand up and talk about the worst failings of the Foreign Office, and I recognise that the debate will be responded to by a Minister who represents some of the best efforts of civil servants, who go into incredibly dangerous and difficult circumstances to try to serve our constituents. I want to put that on the record.

There is a lot of talk in this Chamber about the legacies that this Government have inherited, and it is good that we are talking about one of the worst ones: our country’s record of securing the release of those who have been arbitrarily detained overseas. I will come to some of the policy issues that other Members have touched on, but I will deal first with the principle behind such cases.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote:

“To sin by silence, when we should protest,

Makes cowards out of men.”

What is true of individuals is also true of nations. The Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry), spoke about the example of the US, which is relevant here. When other countries’ citizens are held unjustly, it is treated as an affront, an injury to all and a national slap in the face. Yes, quiet negotiation takes place politely behind the scenes on behalf of those countries’ prisoners, but alongside that polite and patient diplomacy is their citizens’ full-throated outrage.

I know that the staff working on this issue in the Foreign Office care deeply about it, but the right hon. Members for Chingford and Woodford Green and for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale) both raised the case of Jimmy Lai. We have to ask why Canada was successful in securing the release of the two Michaels, and how Australia secured the release of journalist Cheng Lai. Just last week, the Americans secured the release of three more of their citizens, yet Jimmy Lai, who is a British citizen and one of us, and who has been arbitrarily detained in solitary confinement for nearly four years, has not been freed. We could talk about Jagtar Singh Johal, Alaa Abd el-Fattah and so many others.

Our first responsibility as a Parliament, a Government and a country is to be publicly, vocally and unanimously furious about this issue. Everything else follows from the righteous anger that we should all feel on behalf of our citizens who are rotting in foreign jails. That anger should drive us to ask what is behind the failure of British diplomacy in the past. A lack of strategy is certainly part of the answer.

Like the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, I was encouraged by the noises that the Foreign Secretary made last week about making good on his promises, both on the issue of a special envoy and on the right to consular access. I welcome the Government’s commitment to step up the engagement on these cases, but that needs to be part of an entirely new approach. I am not naive: I know that it is only because we are having conversations with foreign Governments about trade that we are able to get in the room and discuss our citizens who have been unjustly detained. Indeed, when I was an adviser in the Foreign Office, the role of Minister for trade and human rights was a stand-alone Cabinet position.

Because I believe we must make deals around the world—our constituents’ standard of living depends on it—I question whether our current policymaking framework on arbitrary detention can ever deliver the kind of response that we would all expect if we found ourselves in a prison cell in one of the darker corners of the world. For me, this is about the balance we strike between charming and chastising those we are negotiating with. I wonder whether our current approach to those who are arbitrarily detained makes it inevitable that attempts to secure the release of our people become either a prologue or an epilogue to the main story, which is one of securing our economic self-interest. Are we sending our representatives into these negotiations with red lines that those on the other side of the table know are written in pencil rather than in pen?

After 16 years in a Dubai jail, Ryan Cornelius has had more time than anyone to contemplate that tension. He shared with me a letter he has written to the Prime Minister ahead of the Prime Minister’s trip to the Gulf on behalf of the UK, in which he identifies the inherent challenge in diplomacy I describe:

“Making it clear to your interlocutors that there can be no normal relationship with a friendly country which treats our citizens in this way may be an uncomfortable thing for you to do on this visit…if you look the other way in the interest of sealing a few deals you will have diminished this country’s standing in the eyes of the rest of the world.”

For me, Mr Cornelius’s letter gets to the heart of the matter. In asking our delegations and diplomats to balance arbitrary detention against trade outcomes, the risk is that they will leave those rooms having failed to achieve either objective.

If the arbitrary imprisonment and mistreatment of our citizens is not a red line, what is? If it is a red line, it cannot be something that the people we send into these rooms might have to give up in order to secure other Government priorities. The release of our people must be understood by those on the other side of the table as non-negotiable.

That is why it is essential that any special envoy we appoint has the power, the status and the degree of independence from Ministers to make it an immutable principle not just that the policy on the release of hostages will not be sacrificed for other priorities, but that it cannot be sacrificed for other priorities.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury, the Chair of the Select Committee, was far too delicate, perhaps not wanting to appear engaged in a power grab, when she said that this is a debate for another time, but we have to debate the fact that other jurisdictions place the power for designating state hostages, or for applying sanctions in response to such cases, in the hands of the legislature.

The value of such an approach is that it allows the Executive and their diplomats to honestly say in those negotiating rooms that they cannot separate their wider relationship with a country from the mistreatment of citizens by its Government. I know that the suggestion of losing such power would be greeted with horror in the corridors of King Charles Street, but we cannot simply continue with the current model, which has left British citizens in jail.

As well as greater independence in policymaking, there should also be a degree of automaticity in our policy response. As has been suggested by the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green, when an individual is designated as being arbitrarily detained, there has to be a consistent application of Magnitsky sanctions. This would not only provide an incentive to release the British citizens already held, as it would hold perpetrators to account, but it would also act as a disincentive to those who might target our people in the future. Inconsistent action in these cases simply emboldens those regimes and makes our citizens less safe.

Finally, we have to act in concert with like-minded countries that are similarly committed to the rule of law. Recent years have seen the erosion of norms around arbitrary detention by autocracies that are increasingly working in concert with each other. Only co-ordinated action by democracies, and by those committed to the rule of law, can help recreate a global order in which such actions are deemed universally unacceptable.

There is no cause more urgent than ensuring the liberty and freedom of our own citizens. I commend the right hon. Gentleman for securing this debate.